Tim Carney predicts that the Republican primary electorate will ultimately settle for Mitt Romney:
Perry's run looks less like Bill Clinton's 1992 white-knight performance and more like Fred Thompson's 2008 fizzle. This leaves Republicans with the unthinkable: Romney, who ran to the left of Ted Kennedy in 1994 and who could have been Obama's health policy director, is now the most likely man to carry the GOP nomination in 2012. It's Republican history repeating itself. In 2008, John McCain was the man the GOP base would never tolerate. McCain had passed unconstitutional "campaign finance reform," resisted Bush's tax cuts, supported a Ted Kennedy-sponsored "patients' bill of rights," and advocated amnesty for illegal immigrants, among other apostasies.
Even Chait now sees Romney as a likely candidate. But Perry is still ahead in CNN's latest poll. Andrew Romano points to Romney's lackluster electoral record:
Mitt Romney is missing something. On paper, and onstage, he is almost flawless. But elections aren’t decided by algorithms or debate audiences; they’re decided on the trail. And the bottom line is that Romney is not very good at winning votes. In fact, over the course of his 17-year political career, he has notched only one electoral victory: the 2002 contest that made him governor. Most of the time—in 18 of his 23 primaries and elections, to be exact—Romney loses.
Katrina Trinko likewise isn't counting Perry out yet. Blumenthal puts his lead in context:
Whatever the recent trend, keep in mind that support for Perry, which recent polls have put in a percentage range of the mid to upper 20s, is roughly the same as Rudy Giuliani's support at this point in 2007 and slightly less than Howard Dean received as a Democratic candidate just before the Iowa caucuses in 2004. For Perry to win the Republican nomination, he will need to do more than maintain his current support.
The Dish 