Sorry, Carly. You’re peaking too early. Just ask President Herman Cain.
This week’s CNN poll shows Carly Fiorina, the former business executive, rocketing to the top tier of the Republican presidential race. She has 15 percent support, up from just 3 percent weeks earlier. Meantime, the previously unassailable front-runner, Donald Trump, is suddenly hemorrhaging support, falling to 24 percent from 32 percent.
This dizzying reshuffle of the Republican deck, if confirmed in other polling, can mean only one thing: GOP primary voters have returned to their preferred method of candidate selection, the flavor-of-the-week technique. Using this method, they undergo a flirtation with every possible alternative before finally holding their collective noses and settling on the most obvious, if uninspiring, consensus choice.
In 2008, they sampled Rudy Giuliani, Mike Huckabee, Fred Thompson and Mitt Romney before settling for John McCain. In 2012, there were five front-runners — Michele Bachmann, Rick Perry, Cain, Newt Gingrich and Rick Santorum — before voters settled on Romney. If past is prologue, voters this time will have several more flings before settling for somebody such as Jeb Bush, who thrills nobody.
One explanation is that the Republican electorate is an awfully fickle bunch. A better explanation is that voters just aren’t paying that much attention to the race, and the constant rise and fall of front-runners is little more than a creation of the media.