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Sometimes you see it coming; sometimes you don’t. The biggest winner and loser of the week this week came as a shock to everyone.

Winners:
The political winner of the week this week? No doubt about it: Herman Cain. Cain shocked… well, everybody by winning the Presidency 5 straw poll in Florida. To say Cain won the straw poll is to understate just how overwhelmingly he dominated. Cain, who is not among the top tier of Republican candidates in the national polls, garnered 37.1% of the votes cast by the 3,500 or so Republican faithful in the straw poll. He alone earned more votes than the second and third place finishers. Rick Perry, who schmoozed the poll electorate with a free breakfast, got 15.4% of the vote. Mitt Romney, who did not actively campaign for the honor, came in third with 14%. Rick Santorum and Ron Paul were in a virtual tie with 10.9% and 10.4%, respectively. Newt Gingrich, Jon Huntsmann, and Michele Bachmann were all in single digits.

Runner Up honors for the winner of the week  go to Florida Governor Rick Scott. Scott’s austerity measures are exactly what he promised when he campaigned for office last year, but they’ve still proven unpopular in his home state. His speech to the Presidency 5 voters on Saturday, however, was extraordinarily popular with the audience. A national stage seems to have suited Scott extremely well. In future years, we may look back on this very speech as the launching point for the next step in Scott’s political career.

Saudi Arabian women also came up pretty big this week. According to King Abdullah, women will be allowed to vote and even run for office in the future. It’s like they’ve moved into the early 20th century all of a sudden. Now if they could just legally drive a car.

Florida scored pretty big this week, hosting the Republican debate, the Presidency 5 Straw poll, and moving up their primaries. The Sunshine State managed to grab some major headlines this week that didn’t involve the words “hurricane,” “scandal,” or “man-hunt”.

Losers:
No one lost more political capital this week than Rick Perry. Perry’s worked the straw poll voters hard this week. Maybe too hard. Maybe they reacted to his salesmanship by rejecting him in the polls. Or maybe his schmoozing had no impact and the voters chose their man without regard for campaign tactics. In either case, getting less than half as many votes as Cain in the straw poll just a few days after floundering in the most recent Republican debate was a pretty solid kick in the teeth to Perry’s hopes.