Is Newt peaking too soon?

Rick Perry was already in second place in the polls when he entered the race on Aug. 13. Eleven days later he was the front-runner. By Day 30, the Texas governor had more than doubled his support, peaking at 31.8 percent in the RealClearPolitics Average on Sept. 13 — 12 points ahead of his nearest competitor, the steady, if unspectacular, Mitt Romney.

After that, it was all downhill. Almost immediately, Perry’s unimpressive debate performances began to erode his support. On Day 40, he parried Romney’s criticism of him for a Texas law that allows the children of illegal immigrants to receive in-state college tuition by saying during an Orlando debate that those who disagreed with him “don’t have a heart.” By Oct. 13, exactly two months after he entered the race, the Perry balloon had sagged back the Earth. A month before his famous 53-second brainlock about which federal agencies he wanted to shutter, Perry had fallen to a distant third place among the GOP White House wannabes, registering just 13.8 percent support in national polling.

Herman Cain’s rise was nearly as meteoric. It began the same weekend Perry imploded on the debate stage in Orlando. Two days later, Cain temporarily turned the race upside down by scoring a dominant win in the P5 straw poll in Florida. Over the course of the next three weeks, the former Godfather’s Pizza magnate shot from fifth place (with just over 5 percent support) to a dead heat for first place with Romney (at just over 23 percent).