In September, the last time PPP polled in Colorado, Perry led Romney 31-18. A Bloomberg poll released at about the same time also had Perry leading in Colorado. Gingrich was considered a fringe candidate at that time.

The polling firm noted that Gingrich seems to have picked up virtually all of Herman Cain’s supporters.

“There’s no one left for conservatives to go to but Gingrich, and he’s proving stronger so far than any of the previous flavors of the month,” said Dean Debnam, President of Public Policy Polling. “It looks like it’s down to him and Romney.”

Of course, 66 percent of the likely Republican voters surveyed said their choice was not yet locked in stone. Interestingly, though, Gingrich was also named by more people as their second choice than any other candidate, with 18 percent picking him second. Overall, 55 percent of Colorado Republicans picked him first or second.

Newt Gingrich at the 2010 Value Voters Summit. (ZumaPress)

“Don’t let them put you in the back of the bus,” former Pennsylvania Sen. Rick Santorum (R) said to a full ballroom at the Values Voters Summit — organized by the Family Research Council — in Washington Friday.

[Congress1] He expounded on that idea to the crowd of about 2,000 Christian conservatives, saying they shouldn’t let “people come out and tell us that we have to put the values issues in the back of the bus, we have to have a truce on the values issues because the economic issues are paramount.” Santorum countered that “we can have no economic freedom unless we have good, virtuous moral people inspired by their faith.”

Beyond encouraging both the continued fight against the policies of the Obama administration and an ouster of Democrats in the midterm elections, conservative politician after politician declared to the attendees of the conference that amidst a recession and the largely economic-based tea party movement, values still mattered.

For instance, Sen. Jim DeMint (R-S.C.) devoted the majority of his speech to the “straightening out” of a voter who was not a social conservative but a fiscal conservative.

Though no speaker mentioned him, Indiana governor and possible GOP 2012 presidential candidate Mitch Daniels is a source of this consternation. The next president “would have to call a truce on the so-called social issues,” he told The Weekly Standard. Even so, the vast majority of the GOP — including Daniels himself, who is still pro-life and favors reinstating “Mexico City Policy” — remains conservative on social issues.

Economics are morals and morals are economics, said many Republican politicians during the conference. As former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee said, “The meltdown of Wall Street was not a money crisis, it was a moral crisis.” Sen. Jim DeMint said the same thing about fiscal policy: “One of the largest costs of the federal government is related to the values issues, to the dysfunctional society.”

Not everyone followed this theme. Mitt Romney, former Massachusetts govenror and CEO of Bain & Company, talked largely about a decline in economic freedom under President Obama. Possibly alluding to the fusion of economic issues and idyllic conservative values, Romney gave rambling anecdote about Christmas shopping at Wal-Mart, to show that the “founders (of those companies) have shaped the way those enterprises are.” The result: polite applause and laughter.

Same-sex marriage, not long ago the headlining wedge issue for social conservatives, did not receive the strongest reaction from the crowd, taking a backseat to ovation-inducing lines about Islam and the proposed Islamic community center in Lower Manhattan. Conservative pundit Bill Bennett said, “Muslims proclaim themselves the new victims, I’m sorry they are not.” However, he insisted, “As a people, we are not Islamophobic. We are right to have questions about Islam.” President of American Values Gary Bauer said of New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg, “Next time you want to give a speech on tolerance, try giving it in Mecca!”

Rep. Mike Pence (R-Ind.), chair of the House GOP conference, also gave a barnstorming speech, connecting stem-cell research, abortion and marriage to fiscal issues. (“You want to find savings? Let’s cut funding to research that destroys human embryos in the name of science and let’s deny any and all funding to Planned Parenthood.”)

On the wings of this speech, Pence won the conference’s 2012 Presidential Straw Poll, beating out Huckabee by 11 votes, 170-159. The win will no doubt encourage speculation of a presidential run for Pence. However, it remains extremely difficult to win a nomination, let alone the presidency, from the House of Representatives, partly given to a low familiarity level among a general electorate. The only sitting House member to ever win the White House was James Garfield in 1880.

But Rep. Pence wasn’t the only politician to benefit from (or fall victim to) newfound speculation and unreasonable expectations. Social conservative activist Christine O’Donnell, who upset Rep. Mike Castle for the Delaware Republican Senate nomination Tuesday, gave a largely boilerplate speech against the “elites” and “D.C. cocktail circuit” who did not think she could win. (She remains 11 to 16 points behind in recent polls.) She did not take questions from the media.

Christine O’Donnell — a genuine insurgent candidate not endorsed by the national or state GOP in the primary — wasn’t the only one railing against “the establishment.” Former House Speaker Newt Gingrich appeared Saturday morning to announce, “the establishment is in a state of shock.” Gingrich — seemingly oblivious to his former position as a powerful and public three-term House speaker — said, “The grassroots is 7-0 over the establishment!”

Establishment leaders like Sen. Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (Ky.), House Minority Leader John Boehner (Ohio) and House Minority Whip Eric Cantor (Va.) were rarely, if ever, mentioned.

Gingrich may have nailed the center of gravity in the Republican party: “I’ll let you decide whether it’s Palin-DeMint or DeMint-Palin,” he said of a potential 2012 ticket. He admired DeMint’s creation of the influential Senate Conservatives Fund PAC and Palin’s messaging prowess on Twitter and Facebook. Gingrich, who lives in the leafy Washington suburb of McLean, Va., said about the surprise win of Christine O’Donnell, who both Palin and Sen. DeMint endorsed, “I’ll go out on a limb and say no one in the D.C. establishment gets it.”

LIDDY: Let’s hope that the key conferences aren’t when she’s menstruating or something, or just before she’s going to menstruate. That would really be bad. Lord knows what we would get then.

Maybe it’s OK if female Supreme Court Justices are post-menopausal?  Or have no feelings or sentiments at all?

Even if the conservative crazies are energizing the base or perhaps helping to raise money for strapped right-wing organizations, these sorts of attacks don’t seem to be having much effect on Republican senators, who are the ones who have to vote on the nomination.

As ThinkProgress reports:

Last night, Sen. John Cornyn (R-TX) called the attacks “terrible” and “wrong.” Sen. Orrin Hatch (R-UT) was asked if he agreed with Newt Gingrich’s characterization of Sotomayor as a “Latina woman racist.” “No, I don’t agree with that,” Hatch replied.