This is fascinating, but pretty much says what’s been obvious for a while — Newt appeals to older whites and angry, ignorant bigots:

Why Newt? Conversations With The Gingrich Base

A big advantage Gingrich has over Romney is that he’s much more willing to name-check many of the anti-Obama arguments favored by the Tea Party that are too politically incorrect for the frontrunner to touch. Gingrich frequently warns of creeping Sharia law, calls Obama a “food stamp president,” and credits the president’s decision-making to his “Kenyan anti-colonial” ideology. Even for a Republican candidate, Gingrich’s voters skew elderly, the wing of the party most susceptible this kind of language.

“When Obama knelt with the Muslims of New York City, I knew we had something bad going on — he really scares me,” Tina Skipper, a retired schoolteacher in Jacksonville, told TPM at a Gingrich town hall. “Romney’s a good candidate, so is Paul, but they’re not strong enough to counteract Obama. Gingrich will say what’s really going on and not flinch.”

“The threat from Muslims — I think the others shy around it,” Eileen Loney, an accountant also attending the event, TPM.

It’s not that Romney doesn’t try to play to Republican’s darker fears — he frequently describes the country as being transformed into some kind of unrecognizable European dystopia — but Gingrich has been doing this a long time and it clearly comes more naturally. This sense that Newt understands the enemy’s true nature helps feed a belief that Romney just doesn’t have what it takes to fend off the worst of what’s coming.

“Everybody’s becoming dependent,” a retired manufacturing entrepreneur in Cocoa, FL told TPM “Are the blacks going to vote for Newt or Romney? The Hispanics? The unions? The teachers? The only way to win is to get someone articulate who can turn out conservatives while the others stay home. But if everyone ends up being subsidized voters, we’re dead.”