In today’s Morning Jolt, a lot of discussion of whether the Occupy Wall Street protests are anything resembling “mainstream,” a proposal to review Americans’ tithing, and oh yes, that onetime frontrunner for the GOP nomination:

Momentarily Wondering if Pollster Forgot to List Rick Perry as a Candidate Option

Hey, remember Rick Perry?

Apparently Floridians don’t. Pollster Matt Towery: “Our last poll of Florida was when Rick Perry was red hot, right after he first joined the race some weeks ago. He now barely has a heartbeat.”

At Hot Air, AllahPundit is incredulous: “When I saw Perry’s topline number of three percent, I figured the ‘Ponzi scheme’ talk must have sent Florida’s seniors running screaming into the night. Not so. He’s actually doing (marginally) worse with other age demographics in this poll, and in the last poll he did reasonably well with the 65+ crowd, finishing second to Romney in that group with almost 23 percent. That poll was taken on September 13, which was almost a week after Romney started attacking him on Social Security, so if entitlement chatter is what’s driving this, you would have expected to see some of that show up in last month’s data. What’s killing him here, I assume, is the same thing that’s killing him everywhere — his crack about the base’s ‘heartlessness’ on immigration plus general disappointment that the anointed Romney-killer in the race has ended up making Romney look better and better with his debate performances thus far.”

Our Katrina Trinko offered a sense of how the Perry team plans their comeback:

His campaign is adamant that the Texas governor — who has never lost an election — will be able to claw his way back up in the polls by frequently visiting early primary states and gradually rolling out a series of economic proposals targeted at promoting job creation.

“Debates are one aspect of the political process, but people in the states want to meet the governor,” says Perry spokesman Mark Miner. “They want to hear him firsthand, not filtered through the circus of a debate.”

Perry, Miner says, is “at his best” when doing retail politics. “He resonates with people,” Miner adds. The campaign intends to utilize that through regular trips to early primary states, with Perry doing town halls with voters. The candidate was in Iowa last weekend, is returning today, and will be back again next weekend. There is also an organizational push: “We have staff and grassroots organization in key early-primary states that are going to be active, and they’ll be running a vigorous campaign in each of those early-primary states,” Miner says.