Over the Thanksgiving holiday I was looking at some polling charts at pollster.com. And I had what I can only call a computational epiphany. Those of us who are watching the races at least somewhat closely know that the basic tension in the Republican race is that Rudy Giuliani has been consistently in the lead nationally but Mitt Romney appears poised to do well in the early contests that usually determine the nominee.

But when I looked at this trend line charts put together by Professor Charles Franklin for Pollster.com I suddenly thought it was much more likely than I did that Mitt Romney is going to be the Republican nominee.

I'm reproducing these charts from Pollster.com. But I've had to shrink them down a bit to get them to fit within the space I have here in the blog column. So if you want a clearer view click on the graph and the link will take you to the appropriate page at Pollster.com.

So what do we have here? Let's cut to the chase. In each graph, Mitt Romney is the brown line and Rudy Giuliani is the purple line.

The pattern jumps right out at you. In each of the three states, Romney has been gaining support consistently and fairly rapidly since the beginning of 2007. In two of the three states, Giuliani has been trending downward with a similar pace and consistency. The exception is New Hampshire where Rudy has trended down a bit but basically held his own. There too Rudy's numbers may be dipping as the two most recent polls, which I don't believe are included in the New Hampshire chart, have Rudy down to 16%

Another thing jumps out at me in the Iowa poll. We've given a lot of editorial attention to Huckabee's surge in Iowa and the consequences it could have for Romney. I still believe that. But the graph makes pretty clear that the issue is Huckabee's surge, not any drop off in Romney's support. He's still rising, albeit at a slower pace. And that may simply be due to the fact that in a large field it gets harder to keep up the rate of increase in support as you near 30% of the total.

You can't ignore the national numbers. I grant that, though I think there are some decent arguments that they're based on name recognition and on those who are not most actively engaged in observing the candidates. But the consistency of Romney's strength in these three states is striking. And we're getting close enough to the voting and caucusing now that absent any big new facts to shake things up that these trends will continue.

I'll follow up tomorrow with some more thoughts, contrary theories of what the numbers mean and so on. But I can't look at these numbers without thinking that Romney's in a much stronger position than people think.