The former Speaker of the US House of Representatives, Newt Gingrich, is confidently predicting he will be the Republican Party's presidential candidate to take on Barack Obama next year.
Mr Gingrich has surged in opinion polls in recent days as the campaigns of rival candidates Herman Cain and Mitt Romney stall.
"I'm going to be the nominee," Mr Gingrich told America's ABC News, in an AFP report quoted by Australia's ABC. "It's very hard not to look at the recent polls and think that the odds are very high I'm going to be the nominee."
Mr Gingrich, a long-time force in the Republican Party, received 38% support from respondents in a new Rasmussen Reports survey of likely Republican primary voters.
That is more than twice the support given to Mr Romney, who had been deemed by many to be the default front-runner, and it's the biggest lead attained by any Republican candidate so far in the pre-primary jockeying for position.
Mr Romney has consistently been among the top contenders throughout the pre-primary season. But in Rasmussen's national survey of 1000 people he appears to have lost a great deal of ground to Mr Gingrich.
No other candidates received double-digit support, according to the poll.
The result confirms a Quinnipiac University survey of Republican voters that showed Mr Gingrich pulling ahead of Mr Romney by 49% to 39%.
Romney not convinced
The BBC reports Mr Romney has responded to Mr Gingrich's claim by telling Fox News the US does not need "better lobbyists, or better deal-makers, better insiders".
Mr Romney also disagrees with Mr Gingrich's assertion that he will win the nomination.
"Let me tell you, over the last year, [there have] been a lot of people that have been real high in the polls that are not high in the polls any more," he says.