ORLANDO, Florida — “We are going to win a decisive victory
tomorrow with your help,” Newt Gingrich declared at a rally here on
Monday night, after repeating the populist stump speech that Stacy
McCain
observed a few hours earlier in Fort Myers.
That didn’t happen, of course. Yesterday Mitt Romney was
declared the winner in Florida as soon as all of the polls had
closed. Newt’s “decisive victory” was a decisive loss, as everyone
knew that it would be. (Surely, even Newt himself wasn’t delusional
enough to think he’d win, merely disingenuous enough to say so.)
But when he took the stage before a relatively small crowd at his
election night party, Gingrich was defiant: “We are going to
contest everyplace and we are going to win and we will be in Tampa
as the nominee.”
AFTER HIS VICTORY IN SOUTH CAROLINA, Gingrich was leading
in the Florida
polls by as much as nine points. He won in South Carolina
largely because voters were impressed with his performance in
debates. Live by the debate, die by the debate: Newt’s lackluster
performance in the two debates last week quickly drove his poll
numbers south. Just as important: Advertising, the vast majority of
it negative. Romney’s performance in the debates was effective in a
way that observers outside of Florida may have missed: He was able
to reinforce the message of the attacks in his ubiquitous ads.
(Romney and his supporters outspent Gingrich and his supporters by
a ratio of four to one.)
Newt’s sinking polls seemed to send his campaign spiraling
out of control. The Romney strategy of sending surrogates to talk
to the press at Gingrich events — “let’s go rush the quarterback,”
in the
words of Romney advisor David Kochel — goaded the Gingrich
campaign into
confrontations that reinforced exactly the narrative of an
erratic, sinking Gingrich campaign that the Romney campaign wanted.
A weird and unnecessary
fight with the traveling press didn’t help matters.
By the end of the campaign, the Gingrich campaign was
swinging wildly and desperately, hurling spurious
accusations about Romney taking kosher food away from Holocaust
survivors.
Can Gingrich recover, as he insists he will? This has been
a volatile race, and there may still be surprises ahead. But Romney
has a lot going for him. Gingrich campaign press secretary R.C.
Hammond has been tamping down expectations for upcoming contests,
telling CNN that Nevada, which holds caucuses on Saturday, is
the “toughest one” for them to compete in. He adds that they “are
not putting Michigan first” among states they can compete in;
Michigan’s primary is on February 28. This makes sense; Romney won
both states in 2008. (A fairly large percentage of Mormons —
generally inclined to vote for Romney, their coreligionist —
participate in Nevada, and older voters in Michigan still have fond
memories of Romney’s father, Governor George Romney.) But it
underscores the hard terrain ahead; it is not clear how Newt can
build momentum as the race progresses.
Gingrich might be able to effect a shift in the narrative
of the campaign with a strong debate performance, but the next
debate isn’t scheduled until February 22, after caucuses in Nevada,
Maine, Colorado, and Minnesota, plus a non-binding primary in
Missouri where Gingrich won’t be on the ballot (all his campaign
had to do was submit a form and pay a filing fee, but they didn’t
do it). Ron Paul has built organizations robust enough to make a
strong showing in the caucus states, as has Romney. If Gingrich
can’t register a win, it will be much harder to raise money, and
thus harder to sustain his campaign.
Over the weekend, Gingrich
suggested that if Rick Santorum drops out of the race, he can
win by consolidating the anti-Romney vote. Some polls of upcoming
states seem to support this theory, but tonight Romney got more
votes than Gingrich and Santorum combined, suggesting that even
without Santorum in the race (Paul is guaranteed to stay in),
Gingrich can still lose to Romney. And unless there’s big surprise
in the coming weeks, that’s most likely what will
happen.
