pretty steady. we re at ward 1. you step inside where voters started showing up about 6:00 this morning. right now you see a few of the voters here. you haven t seen the long lines, but a steady stream of folks coming in here. this is a very busy ward. we take a look back to 2008, according to official als here, they had to call up the clerk s office and get the ballots. they got the ballots this time. perhaps they won t have to do that. overallstate wide according to the secretary of state s office, they re expecting 250,000 ballots to be cast in this highly contested republican primary compared to last time in 2008, roughly 9,000 more, kyra. romney s had a pretty rough 48 hours. what kind of impact do you think that will have? reporter: i think the real test will come once all the votes are counted. what i can say though is that when he made the mistake yesterday of referring to enjoying firing people he was talking about insurance companies that aren t up to par. you s
out in the field yet. i think the silence about cain is telling. romney made a point to say the allegations were disturbing but didn t go there last night. you saw the reaction of the crowd and i think maria bartiromo stayed steady, went ahead and asked the question that had to be asked in the debate. a rival campaign told me, here s the deal on cain, we re going to step back and wait and hope that his supporters reluctantly come to the conclusion that he can t win and then we hope to be able to inherit that support. that s the game plan right now. nobody wants to take on cain, they want to let this sort of settle in and do the damage. mark haleprin, what was the reaction to cain at the debate last night? when you talked to cain supporters after? you know, cain supporters are still with him. they were very much with him in the hall. and if you didn t know about the controversy. if you d been blocked from that and you took that one question on and you looked at the rest of his ans
don t forget this, her deal is with the nra. her deal is not with cain. she is not damaging cain at all. he can t say it will cost you $1 billion in damages because i might be president. would her speaking out hurt the nra? frankly, it probably would haven t any effect on nra. dana: as am toer editor, let me ask you this. you are from politico. you re politico. you get a tip about the story from somewhere. you don t run with the people s name but they know who they are. this person never talked about this. now they re dragged in to this because of politics that could then if it was leaked by a rival campaign, does it hurt the campaign more? would you have not disclosed her name in the original piece? greg: that s tough more me because most of the original stories i wrote were about abs.
suggestion quote reckless and false. joining us today, what s the atmosphere in the campaign like right now? good afternoon, craig, we re seeing a defiance from the cain campaign. late yesterday we heard the accusations leveled by the perry campaign, there s this guy curt anderson who helped advise cain during his run for the senate in georgia in 2004 had been privy to this information about these suits, that these women leveled with the nation restaurant association and now he s a perry supporter and that s where they say that rick perry got this information, somehow leaked to the press. even if the story holds true, it does not answer the questions that everyone is asking, what exactly happened? saying it s rival campaign, putting out this information, this doesn t hold a lot of water with people who want to know exactly what it is that happened with mr. cain and whether or not he s ever sexually harassed thiz
can t leak what it didn t know. that is where we start today. a whole new round of accusations and denials in the hottest story in politics this week anyway. the man now leading the republican race for president says he think he knows who leaked a sexual harassment allegation from the 1990s. herman cain says he confided to an advisor named kurt anderson back when cain was rubbing for a senate seat from georgia in 2004. today anderson works for rick perry who s plummeted in the polls while cain has soared. but that s hardly the final word on all of this. cnn chief political animal gist gloria borger joins me now with many more words, some of this from kurt anson himself. hi, gloria, what s his side of this? i spoke with him this morning on american morning. his side of it is just flatly that the conversation that herman cain said happened never happened. listen to this. well, there s two problems with that. one is i didn t know anything about this and so it s hard to l