In the New York Times’ (October 11) article titled, “Debating points, Vice Presidential Edition” dealing with Vice Presidential debates held on October 11, there was the following sentence:
“How are the undecided voters breaking after the first debate? Does the trend toward Obama, which began in mid-July, continue? It does. The still undecided voters continue to break for Obama by more than 2 to 1. Whether the wave that broke for Romney in most national polling after the debate will come later to our cohort, there is of course no way to know.”
I thought “break for” is just a casual idiom, and guessed it means to “go for / support” from the context of the above sentence. However, when I checked dictionaries to make sure of it, I was unable to find “break for” as an idiom in any of Cambridge, Oxford, and Merrimu-Webster dictionary.
Oxford registers “break away (down, forth, in, off, out trough, up, into),” but for “break for.”
Cambridge registers only “break away (off, up)” as idioms.
Merriam-Webster registers only break (down, in, off) as idioms.
Google NGram registers “break for,” whose usage is consistently upward since 1840.
I was barely able to find the following definitions of “break for something” in idioms.thefreedictionary.com/:
- to stop working for something else, such as lunch, coffee, etc.
- to run suddenly toward something; to increase dramatically one's speed while running.
But neither of the above definitions seems to be applicable to “the wave that broke for Romney in national polling”
Does “break for” in “the wave that broke for Romney” mean “go for / support” Romney, or otherwise? Isn’t “break for” an established idiom, though no major dictionaries carry the word?