While South Carolina looks like a toss-up, according to the latest Insider Advantage poll, Florida looks like it could become a rout.  The latest Rasmussen poll shows Mitt Romney with a bigger lead than he had in New Hampshire, beating Newt Gingrich by 22 points in a state that could spell the effective end of the primary:

Mitt Romney is now running away with the race in the latest Rasmussen Reports’ survey of the end-of-the-month Florida Republican Primary.

Coming off his decisive win in Tuesday’s New Hampshire Primary, Romney earns 41% support with former House Speaker Newt Gingrich a distant second at 19%. A new telephone survey of Likely Florida Republican Primary Voters finds former U.S. Senator Rick Santorum running third with 15% of the vote.

Texas Congressman Ron Paul and former Utah Governor Jon Hunstman are next with nine percent (9%) and five percent (5%) support respectively. The two men finished second and third in New Hampshire where independents are allowed to vote in the primary. The Florida primary is open to Republican voters only. Texas Governor Rick Perry runs dead last among primary voters in the Sunshine State with two percent (2%) support. One percent (1%) prefers some other candidate in the race, and eight percent (8%) are undecided.

A loss in South Carolina might soften up that lead a bit for Romney, but that would have to be a very large tumble to lose the state.  His opponents would have to win back huge chunks of demographics, including an 18-point lead among men and a 28-point lead among women, where Gingrich and Santorum tie at 16% to Romney’s near-majority 44%.  Romney even gets the edge among very conservative voters, 29/26 over Santorum with Gingrich at 25%, but wins a majority of “somewhat conservative” voters at 53%, with Gingrich in second at 16%.

Nor is Gingrich likely to make a charge in Florida, according to favorability numbers in this poll os 750 likely GOP primary voters.  He has a respectable 59/37 rating, but Romney’s is 76/21, with his 32% “very favorable” eleven points better than Gingrich’s.  Perry has cratered in Florida, with a 43/52 favorability rating, which still beats both Paul (33/64) and Huntsman (34/51).  Only Santorum challenges Romney in this measure with a 61/29 rating, but only 8% see him as the strongest candidate to challenge Obama, while a majority of 55% say that about Romney. Almost eight in ten expect Romney to win the nomination, and 87% believe that the likely Republican nominee is at least somewhat likely to beat Obama in November.

Assuming Romney wins in South Carolina, a win in Florida is almost assured.  With numbers like this, don’t be surprised to see more GOP figures lining up behind Romney in an attempt to unify the party early and aim its rhetorical guns at Team Obama.  That might be why John Bolton endorsed Romney late yesterday:

John Bolton, George W. Bush’s controversial Ambassador to the United Nations, will endorse Mitt Romney tonight, a Romney supporter told BuzzFeed.

Bolton tweeted earlier this evening that he plans to make a major announcement on Fox News’s “On the Record with Greta Van Susteren.”

And while Jim DeMint has been careful to remain neutral, his advisors are climbing aboard Team Mitt, too:

A group of loyalists to South Carolina Sen. Jim DeMint – including a top fundraiser for Rick Perry – will publicly endorse Mitt Romney’s presidential bid on Thursday, a source confirmed to CNN.

Former South Carolina GOP Chairman Barry Wynn, Columbia businessman and fundraiser Peter Brown, and Columbia attorney Kevin Hall will announce their support for Romney Thursday.

Wynn’s move to Romney is striking. The Spartanburg financial adviser is a member of Perry’s finance team and traveled to Texas in August to meet privately with the governor before he announced his bid.

Jeb Bush will probably wait for South Carolina to vote, but I’d bet that he will endorse Romney shortly afterward.