After a thorough investigation, Daily Intel has discovered that God is separately backing at least three different contenders for the Republican presidential nomination. Over the course of the past few months and even years, God has sent signs and direct messages to each of these candidates encouraging them to run, presumably without telling them that he supports other candidates as well.

Herman Cain: When Cain’s granddaughter was born in 1999, Cain says his first thought upon holding her was, “What do I do to make this a better world?” Cain told Christian radio host Bryan Fischer in January, “I know that that had to be God almighty sending that thought through my mind.” That’s the background for what happened twelve years later. While campaigning for president around December of 2010, Cain was feeling tired and discouraged when he received a direct sign from God that he must continue. This sign was delivered via God’s preferred method of communication, the text message:

Cain has also heard from God more directly, as he told a tea party rally in April:

Cain told the crowd about his battle with cancer in 2006, saying he’s been “totally cancer free” for the past five years. “You want to know why? God said, ‘Not yet Herman,’” Cain told the crowd. “God said, ‘Not yet. I’ve got something else for you to do.’ And it might be to become the president of the United States of America.”

Rick Santorum: But around the same time God was encouraging Herman Cain to run for president, he was also telling Rick Santorum to throw his hat in the race. As Karen Santorum told CBN’s David Brody in May about her husband’s decision to run for president, “It really boils down to God’s will. What is it that God wants? … We have prayed a lot about this decision, and we believe with all our hearts that this is what God wants.”

Michele Bachmann: Meanwhile, Michele Bachmann is all but certain to jump into the race soon, and when she does, it will signal that God has been quietly encouraging her to run for president as well. As Bachmann told World Net Daily in 2009, she would never run without God’s personal endorsement:

“If I felt that’s what the Lord was calling me to do, I would do it,” she answered. “When I have sensed that the Lord is calling me to do something, I’ve said yes to it. But I will not seek a higher office if God is not calling me to do it. That’s really my standard. “If I am called to serve in that realm I would serve,” she concluded, “but if I am not called, I wouldn’t do it.”

Bachmann recently confirmed that she has, indeed, “had that calling and that tugging on my heart.”

God hasn’t been universally generous with his support. He went out of his way to let Mike Huckabee know that he shouldn’t run for president, lest he take his focus off the much more important task of producing a series of conservative American history DVDs. And though God arranged for Sarah Palin to be chosen as John McCain’s running mate in 2008, there’s nothing to indicate that he backs her potential candidacy in 2012. Nevertheless, the fact that God has privately encouraged the candidacies of three different Republicans may cause voters to question whether, in reality, he really even has any preference at all.

God could not be reached for comment by press time, because, a spokesman says, he was helping a baseball player hit a game-winning home run, giving an old churchgoing lady the winning lottery numbers, making sure that a plane made it through the turbulence okay, helping someone survive a heart attack, and also, just for fun, creating a new animal that’s like a cross between a leopard and an alligator.