Fox News Undercard Republican Debate: Live Coverage

Q:Historically speaking, what’s the lowest any candidate has been polling nationally at this point before coming back to win the nomination? — commenter Peter Nygaard A:Peter, looking it up, I believe the answer is George McGovern in 1972. He scored just 3 percent in a Gallup national primary poll a few weeks before the Iowa caucuses. Jimmy Carter was only at 4 percent at this point in the 1976 campaign.

Rick Santorum is raging against the machine right now. He’s pretty salty about being in this undercard debate, as he’s just told us in his opening statement, when the moderators asked him if he’s going to drop out after Iowa — I would say he definitely will if he loses. Iowa has turned into his Waterloo; he technically won the state in 2012, but that win was only declared 16 days after the Iowa GOP wrongly declared Mitt Romney the winner. Romney got the media bump and Santorum got bitter.

Santorum is right that the latest NBC/Wall Street Journal poll omitted him. So did two others since the start of the year, of 24 compiled by HuffPost Pollster. All 24 polls asked about Huckabee and Fiorina, but just 14 asked about Gilmore.