As he prepares for his third State of the Union address--and, he hopes, not his last--Barack Obama's likelihood of reelection has soared in the last few days to 56.8 percent, the highest it has been since last July. This movement correlates with Newt Gingrich's increased likelihood of gaining the Republican nomination, now at 29.7 percent, up from about 5 percent. This upward trend also correlates with a simultaneous downward movement of Mitt Romney's likelihood of winning the presidency if he wins the nomination, now at 44.0, down from about 48 percent. We utilize prediction market data for these likelihoods.

Likelihoods from 2012 Presidential Election

Sources: Betfair and Intrade

In short, the markets think Obama is more likely to defeat Gingrich than Romney, so when the former speaker's fortunes elevate, so do the president's. Over the last week, Gingrich's likelihood of winning the nomination has climbed from about 5 percent to about 30 percent. Currently, Gingrich is about 39 percent likely to defeat Obama if he makes it

I often help moderate the comments on the Yahoo News liveblogs during debates and elections, so I get a rough sense for the proportion of support for candidates among readers. We can only publish a small proportion of the torrent of comments in the liveblog stream--we'd otherwise drown out the experts we've recruited to contribute (imagine the injustice)! But I feel guilty that many comments go unpublished, so I did a tally of all mentions of the Republican presidential candidates in the 1,974 comments we received between 6:30 p.m. and 8:55 p.m. ET on Saturday night.

Here are the results, with mentions of the candidates' names in all caps represented in red:

mentions-cew

Of course, this doesn't account for whether the commenters were saying mean things or nice things--I'm not that good a programmer--but we're working on that at Yahoo! Labs. It does account for first or last name, upper or lowercase, and double counts if two candidates are mentioned in the same comment (but not if the same

Newt Gingrich has won the South Carolina primary, elevating him to a 25 percent chance to win the Republican nomination in online futures markets. This is the first serious assault we've seen on Romney's once iron grip on this particular set of markets in months, which have barely wavered until tonight in their conviction that he will eventually win the nomination. Still, he continues to be the heavy frontrunner with about a 2 in 3 (66 percent) likelihood of gaining the nomination.

Likelihood of Republican Nomination for President_Jan 21a

Sources: Betfair and Intrade

There are several reasons why Romney still has a serious lead over Gingrich. First, he has a larger national organization and more money. Second, he has an institutional advantage of an early start; Gingrich was unable to even get on the Virginia ballot, where he lives, as he surged too late to focus on ballot access. Third, the markets assume that Gingrich is still un-vetted by the current Republican electorate. He is more likely to have negative surprises for voters as they