An unlikely name crept into Thursday night's Republican debate in Florida: Paul E. Tsongas, a one-time Massachusetts Democratic senator and 1992 candidate for president who passed away 15 years ago this month.

Romney, who exercised his right as a registered independent to participate in the Bay State's '92 Democratic primary, acknowledged years ago that he cast his ballot for Tsongas, who was vying with Bill Clinton and Jerry Brown for the right to oppose President George H.W. Bush.

Gingrich reintrodiuced the subject in an effort to draw attention to Romney's less-than-conservative past. Romney replied: "Just a short clarification. I've never voted for a Democrat when there was a Republican on the ballot. And in my state of Massachusetts, you could register as an independent and go vote in which -- either primary happens to be very interesting. And any chance I got to vote against Bill Clinton or Ted Kennedy, I took. And so, I have always voted for a Republican any time there was a Republican on the ballot."

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At the start of this week, Newt Gingrich was threatening to open up a wide lead and run away with the Florida primary. But multiple new polls now confirm that his surge has peaked and is probably receding, raising the possibility that he'll instead suffer a devastating defeat next Tuesday -- and that Mitt Romney will once again emerge as the presumptive Republican nominee.

How did the trajectory of the Republican presidential change so abruptly? The short answer is: It's the Republican presidential race -- wild, almost comical swings of momentum have been this campaign's hallmark. But the more substantive explanation is that (very) recent history is now repeating itself, and Gingrich apparently failed to learn from that history.

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Newt Gingrich is going out of his way to emphasize Mitt Romney's top 1 percent-ness.

Asked about his opponent's position on immigration in Miami today, Gingrich invoked the tax records that Romney released on Tuesday: "You have to live in a world of Swiss bank accounts and Cayman Island accounts and making $20 million for no work, to have some fantasy this far from reality." And he's spent the past week using his own optional flat tax proposal to call attention to the low effective rate that Romney pays. "I'm prepared to describe my 15 percent flat tax as the Mitt Romney flat tax," Gingrich said in Monday night's Florida debate. "I'd like to bring everybody else down to Mitt's rate -- not try to bring him up to some other rate."

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As soon as the sergeant-at-arms announces Barack Obama's arrival in the House chamber Tuesday night, you might want to pay extra-close attention to your television screen: It will probably be your last chance to catch the dean of the Aisle Hogs in action.

Rep. Dale Kildee, an 82-year-old Michigan Democrat who has represented the Flint area since 1976, is retiring from the House at the end of this year, making this the final State of the Union address he'll attend. There's a good chance you've never heard of him, but if you're a regular State of the Union viewer, then you've probably seen him -- or at least the back of his head. Every year, without fail, Kildee arrives early -- very, very early -- to claim a choice spot along the center aisle, putting himself in position to greet the president as he makes his way to the front of the chamber.

Kildee is hardly the only House member to take advantage of the first-come, first-served seating policy for presidential speeches, but as best we can tell he's been at it longer than any of his colleagues. In advance of last year's State of the Union, Salon came up with a name for this peculiar subspecies of congressperson: Aisle Hogs.

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The defining test of Mitt Romney's campaign for the Republican presidential nomination is supposed to be whether he's able to break through the resistance that the evangelical Christians and Tea Party true believers who comprise the GOP base feel toward him. But the first three contests have revealed a different problem, one with potentially serious general election consequences: Enthusiasm for Romney seems directly related to income level.

So far, Romney has fared best among Republican primary voters from the highest income tier, while struggling mightily with the middle and working classes. Consider Saturday's South Carolina results. Romney lost the primary to Newt Gingrich by a 40 to 27 percent margin. But according to the exit poll, among voters with incomes over $200,000, Romney was actually the night's big winner, swamping Gingrich by 15 points, 47 to 32 percent. Where Gingrich did his damage was with those making between $50,000 and $100,000 (41 to 25 percent) and $30,000 and $50,000 (42 to 22 percent).

The same phenomenon was evident in New Hampshire and Iowa.

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Presumably, polling data that is more comprehensive and authoritative will be released in the next few days, but the initial indicators point to a Florida primary race that has been utterly transformed by Newt Gingrich's resurgence.

Just a week ago, when he was coming off victories in Iowa* and New Hampshire and seemed on his way to a convincing South Carolina win, three different polls in the Sunshine State gave Mitt Rommey an average lead of 22 points, with Newt Gingrich running a very distant second in one of them and third (behind Rick Santorum) in the other. But now a new one-day survey from Insider Advantage conducted on Sunday finds Gingrich ahead by 8 points, 34 to 26 percent, while the polling firm PPP announced late Sunday that the first night of its three-day poll in the state found a virtual tie, with just two more respondents out of 600 choosing Romney than Gingrich.

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Newt Gingrich wanted to make Mitt Romney?s life miserable, and now he?s succeeded.

After getting blown out in Iowa on Jan. 3, the former House speaker all but announced he was transforming his presidential campaign into a one-man crusade to exact maximum vengeance on Romney, whose super PAC allies had crushed Gingrich?s December surge with a barrage of negative attacks. Gingrich then suffered through a predictably miserable week in New Hampshire before moving to friendlier turf in South Carolina, where he completed one of the more improbable turnarounds in modern presidential campaign history on Saturday night with a startlingly lopsided victory over Romney.

The outcome severely complicates ? and potentially imperils ? Romney?s march to the Republican nomination. As the week began, he seemed positioned to post his third victory in as many contests in South Carolina, a feat that no previous GOP candidate had achieved and that would have essentially ended the race on the spot. But with his defeat, which came after some of Romney?s most problematic general election baggage was exposed, Romney?s standing in national GOP polls and in the next primary state ? Florida, which votes on Jan. 31 ? figures to plummet. Questions about his appeal to the Republican base and his vulnerabilities in the fall will invite new and intense scrutiny.

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If you're looking for a silver lining in what has been a pretty rotten week for Mitt Romney, it's this: The expectations for Saturday's South Carolina primary have shifted so dramatically that even a razor-thin Romney victory will now be seen as a momentous triumph, while anything short of an outright win for Newt Gingrich will be regarded as a crushing disappointment.

The three most recent polls in the state all show Gingrich pushing into the lead after trailing by double-digits earlier this week, and RealClearPolitics' polling average now puts him a point ahead of Romney. And it's likely that Gingrich's performance at Thursday night's debate did nothing to slow his momentum, and may actually have increased it. So it's not surprising that the Romney campaign is already seeking to soften the blow from a South Carolina loss. As the Huffington Post's Jon Ward reported, one of Romney's top surrogates, former New Hampshire Governor and Bush 41 Chief of Staff John Sununu, is again playing up the long game:

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A significant portion of the seed money that created Mitt Romney's private equity firm, Bain Capital, was provided by wealthy oligarchs from El Salvador, including members of a family with a relative who allegedly financed rightist groups that used death squads during the country's bloody civil war in the 1980s

Bain, the source of Romney's fabulous personal wealth, has been the subject of recent attacks in the Republican primary over allegations that Romney and the firm behaved like, in Rick Perry's words, "vulture capitalists."One TV spot denounced Romney for relying on "foreign seed money from Latin America" but did not say where the money came from. In fact, Romney recruited as investors wealthy Central Americans who were seeking a safe haven for their capital during a tumultuous and violent period in the region.

Like so much about Bain, which is known for secrecy and has been dubbed a "black box," all the names of the investors who put up the money for the initial fund in 1984 are not known. Much of what we do know was first reported by the Boston Globe in 1994 when Romney ran for U.S. Senate against Ted Kennedy.

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There's been talk all week of a Newt Gingrich resurgence in South Carolina, with hints of one in some recent polling.  Now comes brand new data from Public Policy Polling that shows the former House speaker storming into the lead. PPP's survey is more of a snap-shot and only covers one night (Wednesday), but it's the strongest evidence yet of gathering momentum for Gingrich, who leads Mitt Romney by a 34-28 percent margin.

Obviously, the race is volatile, and it's open question whether the interview with Gingrich's second wife, Marianne, that will air on ABC tonight will derail him at the last minute. But it's looking more and more like we'll have a real contest on Saturday -- and not the easy victory for Romney that polls a week ago were predicting.

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The record of Bain Capital is already a primary line of attack against Mitt Romney by Democrats, especially because of Romney's claim that he created 100,000 jobs during his tenure at the firm.

Democrats have released ads on Bain, and Democratic National Committee Chairwoman Debbie Wasserman Schultz said this month of Romney, "He was a corporate-buyout specialist at Bain Capital. He dismantled companies. He cut jobs. He forced companies into bankruptcy and he outsourced jobs and sent jobs overseas."

Obama campaign strategists are also promising that the current flare-up over Bain is just a taste of what's to come in the general election, if Romney is the nominee.

As an investigation by the Hill found, though, Democratic campaigns have actually received more money from Bain executives than Republicans in recent years. The Washington newspaper reports:

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So, you know that oft-repeated line about how Mitt Romney is the first Republican presidential candidate of the modern era to win both Iowa and New Hampshire? It turns out it's not true. Well, it's probably not true -- but we'll never know for sure.

That's the upshot of the final certified count for the Iowa GOP caucuses, which gives Rick Santorum -- who fell eight votes short when the results were announced on caucus night -- a 34-vote edge over Romney, 29,839 to 29,805. But there's a catch:

Results from eight precincts are missing ? any of which could hold an advantage for Mitt Romney ? and will never be recovered and certified, Republican Party of Iowa officials told The Des Moines Register on Wednesday.

In other words, the Iowa Republican Party, which has been conducting caucuses that have served since 1980 as the critical opening test in the party's presidential nominating derby, did not have any mechanism in place to ensure a full and accurate vote count. Since caucus night, according to the Des Moines Register, revised tallies have been trickling in to the state party from precincts across the state. The deadline was the end of Wednesday. In some cases, embarrassing tabulation errors were discovered, and in other cases no forms were turned in at all. Thus, the state party is essentially throwing up its hands and declaring a tie. As chairman Matt Strawn told the Register:

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There's plenty of speculation about which Republican candidates might drop out after Saturday's South Carolina primary. Rick Perry, who took his campaign to the state for reasons that remain mysterious and who is showing no life whatsoever in polls, is the most likely to call it quits, while it's virtually inconceivable that Ron Paul will leave the race no matter what the outcome is. Harder to gauge is what Newt Gingrich and Rick Santorum will do if they both fail to catch Mitt Romney.

But if Romney does prevail on Saturday, it will probably push the GOP race into a new phase -- one where it doesn't really matter what Romney's opponents do because he'll have the freedom to ignore them.

This possibility was driven home when one of Romney's top aides, Stuart Stevens, suggested after Monday night's debate that the candidate might not participate in some or all of the debates scheduled for after South Carolina. Currently, two are set for the week leading up to the Jan. 31 Florida primary, with several others on the docket for February and March. Stevens told the Washington Examiner's Byron York that there have been too many debates and that the most critical topics have been addressed ad nauseam. But as York noted, the campaign's real frustration with the debates may simply be that "Romney is facing continuing questions on issues the campaign would rather not discuss."

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We've spent some time scrutinizing Mitt Romney's time as a leader in the Mormon church in the 1980s and early 1990s, particularly his enforcement of some of the socially conservative policies of the church on abortion, women and homosexuality.

Now ABC has published an interesting story looking at Romney's major financial gifts to the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints over the years, including in the form of stock from deals at Bain Capital. The church requires tithing:

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