(Eric Thayer/Reuters)



(Eric Thayer/Reuters)

For those scoring at home, it has now been roughly two weeks since news broke that Herman Cain had a rather disturbing array of sexual harrassment (and, if some the allegations are legit, sexual assault) charges being levelled against him.

When the story broke over Halloween weekend, political commentators of all ideological stripes rushed to Twitter and other outlets to fix the time of death of the Herman Cain for President campaign.

As the editorial board of the Newark Star-Ledger opined:

Republican presidential candidate Herman Cain won’t admit it yet, and maybe he can’t even see it, but his 15 minutes are up.



To be sure, allegations of sexual improprieties of this nature have doomed candidates in the past, from city council races to bids for the presidency. The chattering classes could be forgiven for assuming that the same fate was destined to befall Herman Cain. Cain's scandal (and boorish response, of which this was a notable example), led many to wonder if the clock was ticking on the Cain train.

But some pundits were more skeptical about the impending doom of Cain. At the height of the scandal, Dana Milbank offered the following observation:

Evidence that he has said something dumb, or offensive, only confirms to his supporters that he is not another polished pol like Barack Obama or Mitt Romney. And so Cain doesn’t need to know what a neocon is, he can weather campaign-funding irregularities, he can have his campaign manager blow cigarette smoke in a campaign ad, he can skip the early primary states in favor of a book tour of the south, and he can sing about pizza to a John Lennon tune. If Herman Cain were found to be a serial killer, his supporters would take this, too, as reassuring evidence that he is not just another career politician.



It has been two weeks, but there is some evidence to suggest that Milbank is not far off. While Cain has experienced some erosion in his support, the erosion has been, for all intents and purposes, slight. Which is potentially disastrous news for the Republicans.

Because when I say the data shows slight erosion for Cain, I mean in the Republican primary. In the general election, his numbers have taken a distinct turn for the worse in the wake of the allegations against him.

Consider the data:

If one looks at the half-dozen GOP primary polls taken since the scandal broke, Mitt Romney indeed does have an edge over Herman Cain. That edge, however, is pretty minimal.

Average of polls, GOP primary, October 31-Nov 10 Mitt Romney: 22.5

Herman Cain: 22.0

Newt Gingrich: 14.2

Rick Perry: 9.8

Ron Paul: 8.2

Michele Bachmann: 3.7

Rick Santorum: 1.5

Jon Huntsman: 1.0



Compare that, however, to the half-dozen polls that were conducted before the scandal broke, and you gain an appreciation for how minimal the change has been.

Average of polls, GOP primary, October 12-31 Herman Cain: 26.5

Mitt Romney: 24.8

Rick Perry: 9.8

Newt Gingrich: 9.5

Ron Paul: 7.7

Michele Bachmann: 3.8

Rick Santorum: 1.8

Jon Huntsman: 1.0



So, while there has been some movement away from Cain, it has been only about two points on the margin. Interestingly, Cain's slippage (4.5 percent in raw percentage) has not resulted in any coalescing around Mitt Romney, whose numbers have slipped marginally, as well (2.3 percent). Instead, welcome in Newt Gingrich as the latest GOP incarnation of that all-important character in Campaign 2012: "Not Mitt".

The question now is whether Cain can survive this recent barrage of negative publicity. And while his numbers have ebbed a bit, there are two reasons why there is every reason to believe he can weather this self-inflicted political storm:

1. His (weak) defense is tailor-made for the GOP base

Cain's primary response to the scandal, besides having his team issue thinly veiled threats to his accusers, has been to attack the media.

To some, this defense mechanism is a bit revolting. As one Newark Star-Ledger editorial (referred to earlier) noted:

The Republican base has shrugged this off. Cain has taken only a small hit in the primary polls, and is raising more money than ever. He gets applause when he pins this scandal on the media, which makes you wonder if the party’s base voters are so thick-headed they don’t want to know if a potential president happens to be a sexual predator.



There's really no need to wonder, given the fact that there is actually data on the question.

Our polling partners at PPP polled several states last weekend, in anticipation of the off-year elections on Tuesday. With that in mind, they hit Ohio, Mississippi, and Iowa's 18th Senate district. And what they found, as it related to Cain, was telling. Only 17-22% of Republicans in those three locales believed the allegations to be "mostly true." What's more: between 65-72% of Republicans thought the media had been "mostly unfair" to Cain.

The most stunning stat in the poll: only between 14-18% in each of the locales had a more negative view of Cain in light of the wave of allegations, and 11-14% actually had a more positive view of Cain after the scandal broke. If it was a net loss, in these three very different locales, it was a decidedly small one.

With data like this, it is not beyond the realm of possibility that Cain can ride the victim train for a good long while, at least on the GOP side.

2. Someone has to be the anti-Mitt

With all of the peaks and valleys of a campaign season, there has been one amazing constant: the stunning consistency of Mitt Romney's semi-mediocre tenure as "leader" of the Republican field.

A year ago, Mitt Romney stood as the undisputed leader of the GOP field, but with support that stood in the low 20s. Today, Mitt Romney still is the leader of the GOP field, but now in nothing better than a "co-favorite" position. What is telling, however, is that despite the tightening focus of the electorate and a slightly smaller field, the support for Romney is still in the low 20s.

The succession of campaign boomlets, ranging from Trump to Bachmann to Perry to Cain (and to non-candidate Chris Christie, briefly) has proven time and again that the GOP electorate is not close to being sold on a Mitt Romney nomination.

The simple fact of the matter is that it is almost certainly past the point of no return for a new candidate to enter the fray. So, someone has to be the consensus choice to be "not Mitt Romney." A second Perry boomlet, after last week's debate catastrophe, seems a longshot. A first Gingrich boomlet has definitely materialized in polling over the last two weeks, so perhaps he can be that guy. But Cain still lingers on as the primary "non-Mitt" in the field, and a Quinnipiac poll this week showed that Cain would beat Romney head-to-head in both Florida and Ohio.

The bottom line is this: despite all that has happened in the past two weeks, Herman Cain could still easily emerge as the Republican nominee.

The bad news for the Republicans: because of all that has happened in the past two weeks, it is tougher to see how Herman Cain emerges as the President-elect.

While there hasn't been much movement since the scandal in the GOP primary, there has been quite a bit more in the general election. And the clearest evidence for that comes from a pollster rarely cited here: Rasmussen. But it is their polling that shows the clearest evidence of a Cain swoon vis-a-vis the president. In late October, a Rasmussen poll gave Cain a two-point edge over Obama (43-41). A Rasmussen poll last week, meanwhile, showed Cain now trailing the president by double digits (48-37).

Only one other pollster has measured the match-up pre- and post-announcement. That was NBC/Wall Street Journal, and their latest poll showed Obama leading Cain by fifteen points (53-38). While this is a change of only four points off of their previous poll, it is worth noting that NBC's poll came just as the Cain media boomlet was starting. A week later, it was in full bloom, which was when Rasmussen took their poll on the race.

To be sure, Cain has never been as strong as Romney in a general election trial heat against the president. But having said that, the gap between their performances has moved markedly in the last couple of weeks. Whereas Cain's performance in previous weeks would be 1-4 points worse than Romney's, Cain did nine points worse than Romney in the NBC/WSJ poll and ten points worse in Rasmussen's poll. Similarly, last weekend's poll by ABC/WaPo found a similar (six percent) gap between Romney's margin and Cain's margin when paired with Obama.

Divining why this is the case is actually pretty simple. Republicans are ready-made to buy a media victimhood defense, but it is less likely that Democrats or Independent voters will play along. In a Pew Poll taken in the wake of the scandal, just 18% of those polled thought the media was being too tough on Cain. Meanwhile, a majority either thought the press was being fair with Cain, or even too easy on him.

Furthermore, whereas the Republican electorate was relatively split about whether they were more or less likely to support Cain after the scandal broke, the general electorate was more clearly aligned. According to last week's CBS poll, only 4% were more likely to vote for him in the wake of the scandal, and 30% were less likely to do so.

Therein lies the dilemma for the GOP, though it is essentially the same dilemma they have had since the cycle began. The electorate for a general election might be willing to consider a Romney presidency, but is the Republican primary electorate? Or is the GOP base so lukewarm on Romney that they might be willing to discount even sexual harrassment in order to find an alternative?

If they are, conservatives might be setting up for a national repeat of the 2010 dynamic that introduced the nation to Sharron Angle and Christine O'Donnell, and helped save the Senate for faltering Democrats. Only this time, their lust for ideological fealty might ignore more than political common sense. It might ignore something far more grave.