Wow, do they ever hate Mittens. Yet they can’t seem to get rid of him. Brent Budowsky writes,

Mitt Romney is having great trouble winning the loyalty of Republican voters above the 25 percent level. About 75 percent of Republicans do not support Romney as their first choice. In fact, for many of these GOP voters Romney is their fourth, sixth or even eighth choice behind the conservatives now running and the conservatives who chose not to run.

Mittens is like the zombie candidate who won’t die. The only reason he has stayed near the top of the polls, Budowsky says, is that Republican voters are divided amongst the remainder of the candidates. And the remainder of the candidates are such losers that they wilt almost as soon as a spotlight hits them. Herman Cain has given it about as good a run as anyone has, but now his popularity is sagging under the weight of sexual allegations.

(BTW, righties, do pay attention and notice that “liberals” are not the primary force behind dragging those old allegations into the light. We are not the ones interested in undermining Herman Cain’s campaign at this point.)

(Also too, this is one of the dumbest things I’ve read yet about the matter.)

Budowsky wants conservatives to rally behind one not-Mittens candidate, or else take steps to drag the selection out so that it can be brokered at the convention. Jeb! Jeb! Jeb!

But John Batchelor at Daily Beast says Mittens will win the Iowa caucus, because Mittens is the only one whose got the money in the game to get people to the caucus.

“It’s gonna be Romney, and the party is miserable,” observed a Republican agent just back from the presidential contest in Iowa. “One day Bachmann, the next day Perry, then another day Cain, now Newt. The flavor of the day will pass. Why do many Fox contributors become candidates? It gets you in the debates and polls. But it doesn’t stick. Iowa is about paying an organization to show up. They are used to it. It’s an entitlement to Iowa. First in the nation means mercenaries, buying up the talent, then bringing the people you paid for to the caucus.”

Is he saying that caucus participants are being paid to vote? Or am I misreading something?

Nate Silver says that both Mittens and Cain are slumping a bit in the polls, but Newt is surging. Will Newt maintain flavor of the month status going into the early primaries (for which everyone says he lacks the organization on the ground to do that well), or will it be Rick Santorum’s turn by then?