Florida is not South Carolina, and neither is it Iowa or New
Hampshire, and the pundits rushing to early judgment about the
likely result of next Tuesday’s primary in the Sunshine State
should take a deep breath and calm down. Such was the advice
offered by Florida GOP activist Sarah Rumpf yesterday, and I feel
obligated to share her advice with people whose knowledge of
Florida politics is less direct and extensive than hers.
“These people in New York and D.C. are looking at it from
30,000 feet up in the air and you can’t do that,” Rumpf said.
Currently involved in Republican Adam Hasner’s Senate campaign and
not allied with any of the remaining GOP presidential contenders,
Rumpf was an early supporter of Marco Rubio’s successful challenge
of former Gov. Charlie Crist in the 2010 Senate primary, a crucial
battle for the Tea Party movement.
Rumpf called me Monday to warn against underestimating the
strength of former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney’s campaign
organization in Florida. Romney endorsed Rubio in 2010 and
campaigned with him, garnering respect from Tea Party activists and
also from the Cuban-American community that is an important GOP
constituency in South Florida. Furthermore, Rumpf said, Romney has
a large staff of experienced Florida operatives who have been
working in the state for months, and have been especially active in
pushing Romney’s supporters to submit early absentee votes, a
process that began over the weekend. Most of all, Romney has a vast
funding advantage which allows him to advertise heavily in
Florida’s expensive TV marketplace. Monday, the Romney campaign
rolled out a new ad attacking former House
Speaker Gingrich: “While
Florida families struggled during the housing crisis, Newt Gingrich
cashed in while working for Freddie Mac.”
In Monday’s debate televised by NBC, Romney doubled down
on Gingrich’s work for Freddie Mac, a federally funded enterprise
implicated in the meltdown of the home mortgage industry.
“Freddie Mac was paying Gingrich $1.6 million while taking
money from the American people,” he said. Romney also hit
Gingrich’s support for Medicare prescription drug benefits, an
attack that prompted Gingrich to accuse Romney of “walking around
this state saying things that aren’t true.” But Romney came back
hard, saying that Gingrich’s consulting clients benefitted from his
advocacy: “You could call it whatever you like; I call it influence
peddling.”
Those trying to figure out who won the frequent clashes
between Romney and Gingrich during Monday’s debate were deprived of
the evidence provided by audience applause, which NBC moderator
Brian Williams prohibited from the start. And pundits face similar
problems attempting to prognosticate the result of next week’s
primary. Both Gingrich’s supporters and his enemies
appear to have over-interpreted his South Carolina victory.
Jennifer Rubin of the Washington
Post seemingly succumbed to abject
panic, warning that Gingrich is “perhaps the only GOP
candidate who could shift the spotlight from President Obama to
himself, alienate virtually all independent voters, lose more than
40 states and put the House majority in jeopardy.” This is a
genuine and widely shared concern among Republicans, that
Gingrich’s controversial past and “grandiose” tendencies might
prevent the election the party wants — a referendum on Obama’s
first term.
Yet Rubin’s “open letter” to GOP leaders including Haley
Barbour, Jim DeMint, and Mitch Daniels, demanding that they either
jump into the presidential race themselves or else “collectively
get behind a not-Gingrich candidate,” was a premature warning about
an emergency that has not yet arisen and may never arise. Gingrich
is a Southern conservative, and Republican voters in South Carolina
clearly shared his “mad as hell” attitude, rejecting Romney, whom
Gingrich repeatedly called a “Massachusetts moderate.”
The polls showing a Sunshine State surge
for Gingrich need to be seen in the context of a
remarkably volatile Republican electorate, which has repeatedly
jumped from one frontrunner’s bandwagon to another over the past
several months. In a
Rasmussen poll taken Jan. 11 — the
day after the New Hampshire primary — Romney led in Florida by 22
points; in Rasmussen’s
poll taken Sunday, Gingrich led by
nine points, a 31-point swing in less than two weeks. But Florida
is not South Carolina, and Gingrich’s ability to sustain his
post-Carolina momentum cannot be extrapolated from polls taken more
than a week ahead of the Jan. 21 primary.
Rubin’s evident panic over Gingrich’s surge is as
unnecessary as the demands from Gingrich’s advocates that former
Pennsylvania Sen. Rick Santorum quit the race in order to
consolidate conservative opposition to Romney. Gingrich’s South
Carolina win
destroyed the “inevitability” argument
that might have permitted Romney to score an early knockout
in the 2012 campaign. Whatever the outcome in Florida, the battle
for the GOP nomination will continue at least through “Super
Tuesday” on March 6, and perhaps well into April. The stakes in
Florida are much higher for Romney than for any of his opponents.
If Romney loses Florida, the media will begin comparing him to Ed
Muskie, the 1972 favorite of the Democrat Party establishment whose
campaign unexpectedly fell apart, handing the nomination to
anti-Vietnam War candidate George McGovern. But even if Romney’s
organizational advantages help him recover to gain a narrow win
next Tuesday in the Sunshine State, he will still be seen as very
vulnerable heading into the Feb. 4 Nevada caucuses, where Texas
Rep. Ron Paul’s fanatical supporters are hoping for an upset
victory.
Some Republicans expect Gingrich’s surge to carry the
former House Speaker to victory in Florida, but playing the
expectations game has been a high-risk endeavor in this year’s
campaign. Last week, a member of Romney’s staff told me that they
had initially expected former Minnesota Gov. Tim Pawlenty to be one
of their most formidable foes, but Pawlenty was the first candidate
to quit the race. Many conservatives expected Texas Gov. Rick Perry
to be Romney’s strongest rival, yet Perry’s status as frontrunner
lasted barely a month and he dropped out before the primary in
South Carolina, which had originally been his must-win “firewall”
state. Almost no one expected Santorum to be among the Final Four
contenders for the nomination, yet he won the Iowa caucuses and
remains resolved to keep fighting despite the formidable odds
against him.
A desire to hurry up the Republican nominating process was
one of the motives that inspired Florida GOP leaders to leapfrog
their primary from March to January (see “Why
Does Florida Hate America?” Sept. 30), thus
scrambling the entire campaign calendar. But one rather famous
Floridian said Monday he is content to let the process play out:
“We’re nowhere near being over here. I don’t subscribe
to conventional wisdom, and neither should you.”
Who said that? Palm Beach resident Rush Limbaugh. And, as
usual, Rush is right.
