Yesterday PPP released numbers showing Herman Cain leading Mitt Romney 30-22 in Iowa and our monthly look at the national picture finds the exact same numbers.  Cain is up 30-22 on Romney with Newt Gingrich sneaking past Rick Perry for 3rd place at 15% to Perry’s 14% with Michele Bachmann and Ron Paul tied for 5th at 5%, Jon Huntsman 7th at 2%, Rick Santorum 8th at 1%, and Gary Johnson 9th with less than 1%.

Strong Tea Party support has Cain in the driver’s seat nationally, just as he has been on our last four individual state polls.  With non-Tea Party Republicans Romney actually leads Cain 29-27.  But with the Tea Party crowd Cain is getting 39% with Gingrich at 16%, Perry at 14%, and Romney in 4th place at 13%.  Romney doesn’t need to win the Tea Partiers to be the Republican nominee.  But he does need to finish better than 4th with them.

There are indications within the poll that Cain’s stay at the top could be short lived. Only 30% of his supporters are solidly committed to him with 70% saying they might still go on to support someone else. Those numbers aren’t much better for Romney, who only has 31% of his supporters solidly committed, or Gingrich, who only has 34% solidly committed.  The strongest base of support among the Republican front runners- even if it’s shrinking- is Perry’s- 48% of his remaining backers say they’ll definitely vote for him. Overall 70% of Republicans are either undecided right now or open to voting for someone different than who they’re with now- that signals an extremely wide open race.

Interesting.

And, how would a Sarah Palin endorsement of Cain do to Romney’s front-runner status?

Mitt Romney leads the field vying for the Republican presidential nomination but fewer than one in four of the party’s voters back him as a surging Herman Cain gains ground, according to Reuters/Ipsos poll released on Wednesday.

Romney, a former Massachusetts governor, is holding on to his support but failing to increase it significantly, according to the survey, which also showed President Barack Obama facing deep unhappiness among voters about his performance.

Romney was backed by 23 percent of Republicans in the October poll, up from 20 percent in the most recent comparable Reuters/Ipsos poll carried out in June.

Cain, a businessman who has emerged as a surprise front-runner after proposing a radical tax reform, nearly tripled his support among Republicans in the same period, leaping to 19 percent from 7 percent four months ago.

“In the Republican presidential primary, everybody still says Mitt Romney’s the front-runner,” Ipsos research director Chris Jackson said. “And he is … but he’s certainly not any sort of dominant front-runner.”

Texas congressman Ron Paul was third with 13 percent and Texas Governor Rick Perry fourth, with 10 percent.

Supporters of Sarah Palin, who announced last week she would not run for president, have not coalesced behind a single candidate, the survey found.

The poll was conducted October 6-10, before a debate on economic issues on Tuesday night in which Romney and Cain had strong performances and Perry failed to make up the ground he lost when he stumbled through two previous debates.

“I think Rick Perry’s boomlet probably really peaked in August and has subsided,” Jackson said.

The margin of error for Republicans among the 1,113 people polled was 4.8 percentage points, leaving Romney and Cain in a virtual tie.

The poll was pre-debate and memorializes Rick Perry’s crash and burn.

For now, Mitt Romney continues as the front-runner, as does the conventional wisdom indicates.

Here’s how much political trouble President Obama is in: A new poll by the authoritative Evolving Strategies firm finds that Herman Cain, Texas Gov. Rick Perry, and Mitt Romney would all beat Obama it the election were held today.

The results:

• Despite several bad debate performances by Perry in September, when respondents watched a clip of the Texas governor, he actually gained more support than any of the other candidates and beat Obama by 6-points, 42-36.
• Now Romney had a slightly higher margin—he beat Obama by 7-points 40-33, but he did it with less support. He got less support than Perry, but so did Obama, and there were more people who were uncertain about him, which doesn’t come as a surprise—there’s clearly been a lot of dissatisfaction with Romney as the establishment candidate.
• Finally, the candidate we’re all most interested in—Herman Cain. The question is can he win the Republican primary? And can he win the general election? Well, he can certainly win the Republican primary. Across all treatments, when asked to choose among the eight GOP candidates, Cain won handily with 28 percent of the vote, followed by Romney at 19 percent and Perry at 12 percent.
• When it comes to a general election, Cain barely edged out Obama 35-34, but he moved from 5 points down in the control group with the generic Republican to 1 point up. And this jump came entirely out of Obama’s vote. It’s clear a lot of uncertainty remains in the general population about Cain—for starters he doesn’t “look like” the stereotypical GOP candidate. And he certainly doesn’t have the typical political background. But despite all that, people seem willing to give him a look – and when they get a look at him, he’s running even with Obama. What will be interesting to see is whether all those uncertain votes become more certain about Herman Cain when they get to see more of him.

So, the line that Mitt Romney is the only Republican that can beat Obama won’t fly just quite yet.

But, from the pundit reactions from last night’s debate, it looks like the GOP Establishment types are already circling the wagons for Romney.