But how fast is “eventually?” In this roller coaster race, no one should pretend to know the end point of the ride. There are some powerful examples of candidates who started losing with some frequency once their nominations seemed all but assured.

For example, President Gerald Ford looked like he had vanquished the challenge from Ronald Reagan once he had won the Iowa caucuses and primaries in New Hampshire, Massachusetts, Vermont, Florida and Illinois. Then came March 23 and Reagan’s surprise victory in North Carolina, which started a see-saw battle that led all the way to the floor of the 1976 Kansas City convention.

Four years later, President Jimmy Carter thought he had iced Ted Kennedy after winning the Iowa caucuses and then primaries in New Hampshire, Vermont, Alabama, Florida, Georgia and Illinois. (In that stretch, the only primary Kennedy won was on March 4 in his home state of Massachusetts.) But on March 25, Kennedy shocked Carter by winning New York and Connecticut, and all told, Kennedy won 10 primaries and 37.1% of Democratic primary votes cast.

Can Newt be Romney’s Reagan or Kennedy? What will Ron Paul’s effect be, particularly in upcoming caucuses? And what of Rick Santorum, the forgotten man? He got more votes in Florida than Paul, after all.

First, let’s take a quick look back at why Florida turned out the way it did. After a bad week and a half in South Carolina, Romney responded with a good week and a half in Florida, particularly in the two debates held last week. Romney had perhaps his best moment of the entire campaign season when, last Thursday, he castigated Gingrich for what critics might describe as his early primary state “pork politicking” — such as deepening the port of Charleston or, in an appeal to Florida’s space industry (that turned a bit comical), his proposal to establish a moon colony that could eventually seek statehood. Meanwhile, Gingrich fell flat in the final debate before the primary, even whiffing on his favorite technique: attacking the moderator. This time, Wolf Blitzer, unlike his CNN colleague John King in a South Carolina debate, didn’t walk right into the Gingrich haymaker.

Romney also brought his massive organization and fundraising advantages to bear, which made a big difference in Florida. With more than 600,000 ballots cast by absentee or early voting, Romney’s was the only campaign to organize the effort in a substantial way. This paid off, and he cleaned up among the early vote. Romney and his Super PAC outspent Gingrich and his PAC by about five to one, and Romney’s TV ads were relentlessly negative. Romney called in his chits among establishment Republicans — Bob Dole and a bevy of current and former GOP officeholders — to condemn Gingrich in the strongest possible terms. South Carolina convinced Republican leaders that Gingrich could win the nomination and, in their view, sink the party’s chances in November. Oddly, Newt’s big Palmetto victory was the yin that produced the yang of Romney’s triumph in Florida.

Why does the Florida victory matter so much more than the first three contests? For one thing, the Sunshine State has 29 very independent electoral votes; the previous contests in Iowa (six electoral votes), New Hampshire (four) and South Carolina (nine) had 19 combined, with the third contest being guaranteed Republican for any GOP nominee. And make no mistake: Compared to South Carolina, Florida was a naturally more hospitable place for Romney, seen as the more moderate-conservative candidate. According to exit polls, two in five voters were evangelical or born-again Christians in Florida, much less than the more than three in five in South Carolina.

Gingrich’s decisive defeat should quiet rumblings of a late entrant, although as our Rhodes Cook argued in December, there’s still time for a candidate to get on the ballot in several late, important contests, such as primaries in New York, Pennsylvania, New Jersey and California. But the deadline for entry, in some cases, will come and go as early as next week. The Florida result will only hasten the march of top Republicans, officially or unofficially, into the Romney camp. Republicans may not love Romney, but most of them don’t fear him at the top of their ticket. As a result, the existing field looks more set than ever.

Given Romney’s long lead in money and organization, it is somewhere between very difficult and impossible for Gingrich to seize the actual nomination. But can Gingrich cause headaches — maybe even migraines — for Romney by winning more primaries? Definitely.

Whatever Romney’s problems, February is not a good month for Gingrich. The next event is in Nevada, where four years ago Republican caucus-goers — more than a quarter of them Mormon — cast a majority of their votes for Romney (51%). Expect Romney to do well there again, and it’s even possible that Ron Paul will push Gingrich into third place. Beyond Nevada are more caucuses in Maine (where Paul has been spending a good deal of time), Colorado and Minnesota. Any caucus gives an opening to Paul to exceed expectations. Afterwards, there is a three-week lull before the primary season returns with big contests in Michigan and Arizona.

Rick Santorum, who is appealing to some of the same voters as Gingrich, faces some of the same problems as Newt. And Santorum’s moment appears to have come and gone; he has done poorly since Iowa. Were Santorum to leave the race, the battle for the nomination could get somewhat more interesting — although polling suggests that Santorum’s backers are not monolithic and would split between Romney and Gingrich. When the money runs out, candidates usually depart the race, but Gingrich is a good bet to hang in, in no small part because of his rich friends in Nevada, the Adelsons, who have already given $10 million to support his cause. Paul could outlast his non-Romney rivals, but his low ceiling in most non-caucus states prevents his nomination.

None of the February contests are good for Gingrich. Caucuses, by their very nature, reward long, detailed planning and considerable resources to gin up turnout. Translation: They are tailor-made for Romney and Paul. Additionally, from what we know about these states from 2008 exit polling, none of them are likely to have the heavy percentage of evangelical voters that Iowa or South Carolina had (about 60% or so apiece), which means they will be less conservative and more amenable to Romney or Paul.

Chart 1 shows the nomination contest calendar from now through Super Tuesday. Keep an eye on the Washington State caucus, which is the last event before Super Tuesday. Washington has the most delegates of any upcoming contest prior to Super Tuesday, and Romney and Paul are already organizing there.

Chart 1: After Florida – Upcoming GOP nominating contests through Super Tuesday

Notes: Exit/entrance poll data comes from CNN. “No data” indicates that there was no exit/entrance polling information from CNN. Delegate counts gathered from Frontloading HQ.

*The Missouri primary is non-binding and Newt Gingrich did not qualify for the ballot there. The GOP will hold a caucus on March 17 to determine its delegates.

It is on Super Tuesday, March 6, when Gingrich might be able to get back into a decent position to win somewhere. With heavily conservative, evangelical electorates, Southern states Georgia, Oklahoma and Tennessee might be receptive to the Gingrich candidacy. After all, Newt is running as the closest thing to a traditional Southern Republican. Alabama and Mississippi vote the following week, on March 13. Virginia, too, could have been fertile ground for Gingrich, but thanks to his failure to make the ballot, we’ll never know. (Primary voters in the Old Dominion can only vote for Romney or Paul on Super Tuesday. There are no write-ins.)

By the way, this Super Tuesday is less Man of Steel than Clark Kent. In 2008, there were 21 Republican contests that awarded more than half of the total delegates to the Republican convention. This Super Tuesday, there are only 11 contests that award just about a fifth of the total delegates to the convention.

One major question in determining the effective length of this race is how long the press wants to cover it. Perhaps the best piece of news for Romney now is that, after seven debates in January, only one is scheduled in February (in Arizona on Feb. 22). The other candidates would surely like more, but Romney — who apparently considered skipping last week’s debates in Florida before realizing that he couldn’t — is unlikely to agree to more. How the press assesses whether Romney is the prohibitive front-runner — or even the presumptive nominee — is a significant factor in determining whether he actually is the prohibitive front-runner or presumptive nominee. As it is, Romney only has about 7% of the 1,144 or so delegates he needs to secure the nomination. But perception in these early contests is always more important than reality.

When it’s all said and done, we believe that Romney will be giving the acceptance address in Tampa come late August. But it matters enormously whether he wins pretty or limps home ugly. A much tougher opponent remains for Romney when the harvest moon shines.

With the January jobs report to be released this Friday, we thought we would once again examine the state-by-state numbers, which are shown in Chart 1. Since our analysis of the August numbers, the nation’s unemployment rate has fallen from 9.1% to 8.5% (as of December).

Chart 1: State unemployment rates

Source: U.S. Department of Labor Bureau of Labor Statistics

What do these numbers mean for November? In many places, probably not much. Even if California’s unemployment rate remains at around 11%, President Obama will almost certainly carry the state. At the same time, North Dakotans are not planning to reward the president with their three electoral votes despite enjoying the lowest unemployment rate in the country.

But the numbers are worth monitoring, especially if the election is close (and we expect it will be). For instance, Nevada is a toss up state that, because of its changing demographics and politics, might be leaning toward President Obama. However, the terrible state of the Silver State’s economy — it has the highest unemployment rate in the nation at 12.6% — might be a drag on Obama. Perhaps unhappiness with the economy and another demographic group — the 11% of Nevada’s population who are Mormons — could tilt the state toward Mitt Romney, assuming he wins the Republican nomination.

Then there are toss ups such as Virginia (6.2%) and Iowa (5.6%), which have jobless rates considerably lower than the national average. That could make these states more likely to support the status quo and vote for the incumbent. For the same reason, recent good news regarding the economies of many Rust Belt states could improve Obama’s reelection chances.

States that the Crystal Ball views as leaning one way or the other will also be affected to some degree by their individual unemployment rates. Obama barely won North Carolina in 2008, and the state’s 9.9% unemployment rate helps explain why we believe, at the moment, the Republicans are slightly favored to take back the Tar Heel State in November. Conversely, New Mexico, a state with a large Hispanic population that has been trending more Democratic, has a fairly low unemployment rate, making it more likely to remain in the president’s column.

Again, unemployment numbers, national or statewide, are far from a sure-fire determiner of a November result. But in a state-by-state election, these numbers will help determine how the candidates craft their messages and, perhaps, how open voters are to making a change in the White House.

Up and down and all around the 2012 Republican presidential campaign has gone. It has probably been the craziest nominating race in the last generation.

And from this vantage point, the weirdest event of all thus far was the changing outcome in Iowa – from an 8-vote caucus night “victory” for Mitt Romney Jan. 3 to a 34-vote advantage for Rick Santorum more than two weeks later when the vote was finalized. The state party actually threw up its hands at the end and said no winner could be definitively declared since the results from all precincts could not be retrieved. It expressed congratulations to both candidates.

In a half century of observing presidential nominating campaigns, I have never seen anything like this. Not just the unusual closeness of the vote, but the inability of the folks counting the votes to determine a true winner. The nebulous result was an embarrassment to the Iowa caucuses in general and the Republican Party of Iowa in particular.

Besides that, several other points stand out. First, the Iowa situation was not fair to Santorum. Rather than coming into New Hampshire off an apparent victory, he entered the state basically becalmed. It was Romney who possessed the momentum, getting extensive credit for scoring an ever so narrow victory in hostile terrain.

It is arguable that the initial interpretation of the Iowa result pushed Romney up and Santorum down by several percentage points in the Granite State. It probably cost the latter a chance at third, or even a momentum-producing second place heading off to South Carolina. And it helped Romney swell his winning percentage in New Hampshire to an imposing 39%, which aided him in crafting an image as the GOP’s inevitable nominee.

A second point: the changing Iowa outcome exposed the murky world of caucus vote-counting. In primary states, the elections are virtually always administered by the states themselves, which have long experience in conducting them. In caucus states, the balloting is nearly always overseen by the parties, which have comparatively little experience in putting on a statewide election.

Altogether, eight of 1,774 precincts failed to submit their official caucus vote to the Iowa GOP. But believe it or not, that is a much higher rate of completeness than ever exists in many caucus states, where a final tally with less than 90% of all voting sites can often be the norm.

This is important to note because in the weeks ahead, a wave of caucus states will be in the spotlight. Nevada votes Feb. 4. Maine starts its process the same day and continues for a week. Colorado and Minnesota caucus on Feb. 7, and Washington on March 3. Seven more states are scheduled to hold caucuses in the following two weeks. Hopefully, the contests will not be too close in any of these states, or the possibility of another Iowa-style imbroglio could well result.

In the aftermath of voting in the deeply conservative South Carolina primary, one voter quoted by The Washington Post seemed to summarize what Republicans there were looking for in a candidate:

Many voters said they liked the scrap in the former House speaker’s personality — his willingness to seek confrontations with his GOP rivals and the news media. That, they said, was what the GOP would need in the race against President Obama this fall.

“I think Mitt Romney is a good man,” said Harold Wade, 85, leaving a polling place in this picturesque seaside suburb outside Charleston. “But I think we’ve reached a point where we need someone who’s mean.”

And Gingrich, he said, was the only one mean enough.

Republicans don’t just disagree with President Barack Obama; they viscerally dislike him. And, as Mr. Wade indicates, they don’t just want a candidate who can beat Obama. They are seeking someone who will unequivocally bash and bloody him.

As has been clear from recent debates, Mitt Romney is not that candidate, at least compared to the South Carolina winner and this week’s poll leader in Florida, Newt Gingrich. On the stages in South Carolina, Gingrich mastered both the moderators and the crowd, and Romney did himself no favors with his dissembling answers to repeated requests to release his tax returns. (Romney finally released his most recent tax returns on Tuesday.) By contrast, when Romney finally went on the offensive against Gingrich in the first Florida debate on January 23, his quizzing of Gingrich was mainly mild-mannered, as though he were building a genteel case to bring to his country club’s decorum committee.

The presumption among the press — and among us analysts — for months has been that Mitt Romney was far and away the most electable candidate in the fall against President Obama. But the actual voters, at least in South Carolina, felt differently: in exit polling, among the 45% who said that the most important quality in a nominee was the ability to defeat Obama, they preferred Gingrich 51% to 37% over Romney. Granted, considering how South Carolina Republicans broke for Gingrich, such a result from the exit polling wasn’t really surprising: when supporting a candidate, voters likely don’t think that their guy is a loser. Plus, we also wonder — just anecdotally from interviews aired after the election — whether voters were conflating Gingrich’s ability to win in November with his ability to win debates. Obviously, those are two vastly different things, and with only a few exceptions — 1960’s Nixon/Kennedy debates and 1976’s Gerald Ford gaffe on whether the Soviet Union controlled Eastern Europe — general election debates are not all that vital to the outcome anyway.

A tale of two maps

To be clear, President Obama is vulnerable. His approval rating – 46% approve, 48.6% disapprove, according to the RealClearPolitics approval average — is middling. And against Mitt Romney, Obama’s vulnerability shows: in Pollster.com’s average of national polling, Obama leads Romney just 46.5% to 45.3%. But against Gingrich, the average tells a very different story — Obama, at 49.9%, leads Gingrich (39.1%) by more than 10 points.

Granted, there are outliers: Gallup on Tuesday had both Romney and Gingrich running evenly with Obama, both down 50% to 48%. But the bulk of the polling data indicates that Romney, at least at this point, is the stronger candidate against Obama.

Why does Romney fare better? Well, the best candidate against Obama remains “generic Republican” — that make-believe person who leads Obama by a single slim point, according to RealClearPolitics. Let’s be honest here: Romney’s the closest thing out there to a generic Republican available. He is not going to steal the presidency away from the incumbent if Obama’s having a good year and the economy is solid. Rather, if the country is ready to make a change, then Romney would be a credible alternative. The national polling numbers bear that out; they also show that Gingrich, at least right now, is not seen as a similarly acceptable alternative.

Let’s look at this a different way. Chart 1 shows the Crystal Ball’s Electoral College map. At this point, it is effectively a map pitting Obama vs. a generic Republican; such a race, we believe, would be close, given the president’s relative weakness.

Chart 1: Crystal Ball Electoral College map, Obama vs. generic Republican

Romney, were he the nominee, could potentially make this generic map even better for Republicans. He has no obvious weaknesses in any of the swing states, at least as measured by head to head polling, which we fully grant is not necessarily all that predictive at this stage. Also, he could potentially make some of the competitive states harder for Obama: he could mobilize the not-insignificant Mormon population in Nevada to help in that state and play off his relative home field advantages in Michigan (his father was governor of the state he grew up in) and New Hampshire (he served as governor of neighboring Massachusetts and has built deep bonds with the Granite State, which paid off in his recent primary romp there). In fact, if Romney were the nominee, we’d likely switch New Hampshire to “leans Republican” from toss-up. While this only represents four electoral votes, consider this: take another five Obama states that went for George W. Bush twice (Florida, Indiana, North Carolina, Ohio and Virginia) and put them in Romney’s column, and then add New Hampshire and all of John McCain’s states, and Romney is president.

Unlike Romney, we don’t see any competitive state where Gingrich would potentially perform better than a generic Republican. And, based on polling and our own thinking about the individual state-by-state contests, at this point we think he’d do worse than a generic Republican or Romney.

Again, polling at this early stage is not particularly trustworthy, but the differences between Romney and Gingrich head to head vs. Obama are telling. For instance, in Ohio, a recent Quinnipiac poll had Romney down only two — but Gingrich down by 14. In December in Colorado, Public Policy Polling showed Obama up only two on Romney, but up eight on Gingrich. A Quinnipiac survey of Virginia showed Romney up 2… and Gingrich down five.

Chart 2 shows the Obama v. Gingrich map, which is, needless to say, a nightmare for Republicans.

Chart 2: Crystal Ball Electoral College map, Obama vs. Gingrich

Notice, in particular, how this second map is much bluer in the crucial Midwestern states than the first map. Ohio, perhaps the nation’s key swing state, begins in the leans Democratic column. We also believe Gingrich would have little appeal to Hispanic voters, who are major voting blocs in a number of western swing states. Colorado, Nevada and New Mexico, thus, are more Democratic in this map.

Henry Barbour, nephew of the former Mississippi governor and Republican National Committee Chairman Haley Barbour, drew flak recently for saying that he couldn’t support Gingrich because he said he liked having a Republican speaker of the House; that is, Gingrich would do poorly enough so that Obama’s coattails would elect a Democratic House.

With this map, one can understand his fears. In several Midwestern swing states, Republicans gained many House seats in 2010 that, thanks to their control of redistricting, they sought to lock in through aggressive remapping. Under this map, all of those states — Michigan, Ohio, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin — would be tough territory for Gingrich. If his candidacy were a disaster, those new Republican gerrymanders could unravel. The close battle for the Senate could also be affected — Michigan, Missouri, Montana, Nevada, New Mexico, Ohio and Virginia all have competitive Senate races this year, and all of those states get bluer on our map under a hypothetical Gingrich candidacy.

Gingrich as Reagan?

During debates, Gingrich likes to say that Ronald Reagan was down 30 points to Jimmy Carter in early 1980. He’s correct about that, although Carter, at that point in the race, was getting a sizable poll bounce in the aftermath of the taking of American hostages by the Iranians. Think of it as something like the poll boost George W. Bush got after 9/11 — a rally around the flag effect. By the end of March, Carter’s approval rating was back under 40% after shooting up to nearly 60% — and he led Reagan 40% to 34% in the national Gallup poll, with independent Republican John Anderson taking 21%. As spring melted into summer, and summer into fall, Anderson fell off, and Carter and Reagan fell into essentially a dead heat. Then, when negotiations to free the hostages fell apart the weekend before the election, the bottom fell out for Carter, and Reagan won by 10 points.

Is Gingrich Reagan? Probably not. And the electorate is a lot different and more partisan than it was 30 years ago. And despite Obama’s troubles — he hasn’t had a real polling bounce since Osama bin Laden was killed in the spring — Obama leads Gingrich convincingly in many polls. Much more convincingly than he leads Romney, if he leads him at all.

Of course, this is all highly speculative right now. If circumstances permit — if some unexpected crisis damages Obama, or the economy dips back into recession — Newt Gingrich could be giving his inaugural address roughly one year from now. That’s how important external factors are in deciding the presidential contest.

But don’t doubt for one instant that top Republicans in Washington and across the country haven’t already gamed out their own maps in fearful anticipation of a Gingrich presidential candidacy. And, if Gingrich wins Florida, those same Republicans will be trying to revive Romney or even casting about for a new candidate, however unlikely that scenario may be.

Do endorsements matter? Politicians certainly think so, and they spend loads of time courting party elites and opinion-makers. So far, though, 2012 has shown how the politics of anointment and appointment can fail.

South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley flopped mightily in trying to deliver her state for Mitt Romney. Evangelical leaders held a summit to get the Palmetto State to back their new choice, Rick Santorum, but he fared much worse than Romney. Newt Gingrich knows the feeling — New Hampshire’s supposedly dominant Union Leader newspaper huffed and puffed for Newt and got him less than 10% of the vote.

But it’s easy to cherry-pick examples to prove the folly of endorsements. In some circumstances, they can make a substantial difference.

Throughout American history, presidencies have been created by the laying on of incumbent hands. Thomas Jefferson effectively passed the presidency to his friend and confidant, James Madison. Andrew Jackson handed his populist democracy off to an unlikely dandy, Martin Van Buren, in 1836. Few would have imagined the studious and portly William Howard Taft as president until Theodore Roosevelt picked him in 1908. More recently, George H.W. Bush might not have been elected president without Ronald Reagan’s blessing. Madison, Van Buren, Taft and Bush all got their predecessor’s third term — when popular, presidents have extraordinary powers.

What about little-known state legislators and local sheriffs? Even low-level backing can attract the cameras and generate a positive story. But this can backfire if candidates overplay their hands, as Jon Huntsman did when his campaign hinted at a “major” announcement in Florida. Speculation naturally centered on former Gov. Jeb Bush. Not quite. Huntsman got only his son, Jeb Jr., and the media’s letdown showed in the coverage.

Then there’s Hollywood glitz and glamour — good for attracting donors to fund-raisers, but risky if the stars outshine the candidates in public. When celebrities draw more adoration from the crowd than the fellow on the ballot, the candidate is diminished, not enhanced. Better to have one enthusiastic pop icon in your entourage than a tour bus full of hangers-on. Chuck Norris did wonders for Mike Huckabee in 2008, and now he’s with Newt. As they say, Norris doesn’t endorse — he tells America how it’s going to be.

Candidates try to use endorsements to convey a sense of inevitability. In the days leading up to South Carolina, Romney rolled out endorsements from Ohio Sen. Rob Portman and Virginia Gov. Bob McDonnell. Odds are, the vast majority of South Carolinians had never heard of either. These vice presidential possibilities probably impressed Romney a great deal more than they did Palmetto Republicans.

Even more than Democrats, Republicans typically nominate a candidate that party elites support. In “The Party Decides,” political scientists Marty Cohen, David Karol, Hans Noel and John Zaller analyzed endorsements made prior to the Iowa caucuses in presidential primary contests from 1980 to 2004. They found that the candidate who had won the biggest share of endorsements won the eventual nomination in nine of 10 competitive contests (the exception was Democrat John Kerry in 2004). On the GOP side, the eventual nominees all won a strong plurality of endorsements.

Not surprisingly, given Romney’s position as front-runner and the fear that many Republican officeholders have of sharing a ballot with Gingrich or Ron Paul, the former Massachusetts governor has a long lead in endorsements from elected officials. According to the Capitol Hill newspaper Roll Call, Romney has the backing of 72 members of Congress, versus a combined 17 for the other candidates.

This is good news for Romney. Gingrich is attempting to stir the populism of the GOP base by railing against “elites,” but many voters welcome guidance in intra-party contests. In a general election, voters have the invaluable shorthand cue of the party label. But in a nominating contest, all candidates have the same party label. How to choose just one? Differences in personality, background and policy help, but so does a candidate’s association with other well-known party figures. People want to puzzle out which candidate comes closest to their kind of Republican or Democrat.

Non-endorsements can send powerful signals to voters as well. For decades, leading Southern Democrats practiced “golden silence” in presidential years, refusing to endorse their party’s presidential nominees. This was a green light to voters that it was acceptable to support a Republican for the White House. In 1960, President Eisenhower wanted Vice President Nixon to succeed him, but he damaged Nixon’s campaign when asked what major decisions in his administration Nixon had influenced. “If you give me a week, I might think of one,” said Ike. The comment ended up in one of John Kennedy’s TV ads.

Could non-endorsements end up mattering in 2012, too? Despite decades on Capitol Hill and four years as speaker of the House, Gingrich has only 11 congressional endorsements, five of them from Georgians. Will rank-and-file Republicans see that as a warning about Gingrich’s volatility and management style — or as a badge of honor indicating the anti-establishment, transformational credentials they seek? The answer may determine this election.