Gallup has seemingly new numbers out this morning, trying to measure how Republicans feel about their options for 2012 now that Mike Huckabee and Donald Trump are officially not running. However, it’s worth noting that these are actually numbers from previous months; they asked Huckabee and Trump voters their second choices and added those respondents to the pile of those second-choice candidates.

So these results don’t include any changes spurred by, say, the controversy of Mitt Romney trying to explain how his health care plan’s mandate differs from the one in Obamacare, or Newt Gingrich’s recent headaches. Nonetheless, presuming the Huck and Trump voters haven’t changed their minds in the past few weeks, suddenly the results seem much more conventional, with Romney and Sarah Palin the new frontrunners.

What’s more, Republican voters feel pretty warm towards all of the leading candidates; 74 percent have a favorable opinion of Romney, 72 percent have a favorable opinion of Palin and 69 percent have a favorable opinion of Gingrich.

A few other thoughts:

  • Who are these 4 percent of Republicans who don’t recognize the name “Sarah Palin”? Or the 17 percent who don’t recognize “Mitt Romney”?
  • Tim Pawlenty’s name ID is starting to creep up there.
  • Herman Cain and Michele Bachmann do quite well among voters who know who they are.
  • Despite what I sometimes hear from readers and read in the comments sections, few Republican candidates have particularly high “strongly unfavorable” impressions among Republicans. Only 7 percent of Republicans feel strongly unfavorable towards Palin; 4 percent towards Gingrich, 3 percent towards Romney.