Cain Hopes To Continue Climb In New Hampshire

HANOVER, NH — Look for GOP heavyweights Mitt Romney and Rick Perry to share more of the spotlight with upstart Herman Cain during tonight’s Republican presidential debate.

After an impressive past four weeks in which he has leapfrogged Perry and drawn close to Romney in the polls, Cain is finally being viewed as a serious contender by the national media.

Moreover, voters in key states are beginning to take notice, as well. Cain finished first in a South Carolina poll released this morning and tied Romney in a new Virginia poll also put out today.

The question now becomes, can Cain continue his climb upwards?

This evening’s Bloomberg/Washington Post debate on the campus of Dartmouth College should provide Cain with his first real challenge as a top-tiered candidate.

The candidates will all be asked to focus on economic issues during the roughly two-hour long debate. Cain’s “9-9-9” tax reform plan and his message of de-regulation has proven popular with fiscal conservatives, but now that he’s polling at or near the top of the field, will his Republican opponents spend more time trying to poke holes in his plans?

Despite his remarkable turnaround this past month, the conventional thinking is that Cain still has a lot to gain with GOP voters. His reputation as an outsider may have endeared him to Tea Party conservatives desperate to find an alternative to the establishment’s choice (Romney) and the darling of the faith-based bloc (Perry). But some in the GOP ranks say that his lack of experience in governing hurts him, and that his economic proposals, while lofty, are unrealistic.

New Hampshire, a state that figures to favor Romney, who formerly served as Governor of Massachusetts, could prove to be a difficult challenge for Cain. Though he took home 20 percent of the vote in a new poll released here yesterday, it’s possible that Cain’s surge in the Granite State may be short-lived, much like Rudy Giuliani in 2007.

Due to all of this, and the fact that there are less than three months until the New Hampshire primary, Cain’s performance in tonight’s debate will be critical to his hopes of pulling the mother of all upsets and winning the Republican primary.

Follow Geoff Holtzman’s coverage of tonight’s GOP debate on Twitter.