Can Newt Win?
Daniel Berman assesses Newt Gingrich's prospects of beating Mitt Romney in the Republican primaries.
4 Dec 2011, 16:45
Newt: Frontrunner?
Early this year as the fortune of Bachman, Perry, and Herman Cain rose and fell in turn I steered away from the repeated “Can they Win?” articles that popped up. In a lot of ways, this was because the answers tended to be self-evident.
Herman Cain with an economic adviser who was a real estate broker in Cleveland and with a campaign that was being run as a book promotion tour almost certainly could not have even before his exit on Saturday. The absolute absurdity of his candidacy was such that he was doomed the moment voters began to seriously consider him not as a Republican presidential candidate but as a potential candidate. Bachman, while a slightly more serious figure, made up for the limited gravitas she held over Cain by being all that much more boring once the campaign began to move.
As for Rick Perry, he almost certainly could have won the nomination – he might even, in some circumstances have won the general election. Either eventuality though would have required him to hide from the media and voters while running a campaign based around promoting the idea of Rick Perry and keeping from them the reality. In a sense he was the perfect foil for Mitt Romney – a viable foe against whom his campaign could define itself, but nevertheless destroy at any time. If his implosion itself did not come as a disappointment to team Romney, its totality almost certainly has.
That’s because with Herman Cain’s recent departure, it threatens to leave Newt Gingrich the last man standing.
On initial observation Newt Gingrich should not be all that different from his predecessors as the new anti-Romney. There are plenty of objective reasons why he should implode – he has enough dirty laundry to fill a dozen closets. But nonetheless, most of that laundry is in the public domain and therefore its hard to see exactly what he or anyone else can do in the next month to bring about that implosion. Gingrich has always been a strong performer in the debates and in interviews, and his weaknesses such as they are, a lack of staff or a real campaign apparatus and the money to run it, are not negatives in the eyes of voters. Gingrich as the nominee has always been far less plausible than Gingrich as President.
The fact that Gingrich is in fact the Anti-Perry and Anti-Cain, rather than the anti-Romney is what makes him so dangerous to the latter. All the previous GOP “flavors” of the month were negative campaigns, as much protests against Obama and the current nature of America as they were serious campaigns. They were anti-intellectual, and ironically for those who attempted to target Mitt Romney with the charge of being inconsistent, blatant opportunists. The Bachman-initiated pile on against Rick Perry over the HVP Vaccine for High School girls was one of the lowest points of the campaign, even if Cain’s inability to name his economic adviser was and Perry’s failure to remember government agencies were more painful.
Gingrich by contrast has somehow managed to cast himself as the principled truth teller, a sort of intellectually heavy-weight version of John McCain. He has managed to turn around the greatest criticisms against him, namely that he couldn’t be elected President around in such away that he is running as the sort of person who should be. When the Manchester Union Leader noted they preferred someone who they sometimes disagreed with over those whose stands they did not know they were basically reading off the Gingrich campaign talking points.
Both of these framing successes are superficial, and neither would make him a mortal threat to Mitt Romney’s shot at the nomination by themselves, or at least enough of one to overcome his weaknesses in organization and money. But far more dangerously for Mitt Romney, Gingrich is rising because there is quite frankly no one else left for the floating 65% of the GOP electorate to go to. With Herman Cain’s implosion, and almost imminent departure from the race, he is the only remaining non-Romney conservative who is still standing. The result is that he is almost by default concentrating a vote that has been out there throughout the campaign.
This is a serious problem for Mitt Romney who needs a divided field. While the situation is not quite as threatening as that in late 2007 when Romney came under attack from two directions a lot of the same problems are in effect. In 2008 neither McCain nor Huckabee could threaten Romney in both Iowa or New Hampshire, but together they could ensure that he won neither, breaking his momentum.
This year Romney has the benefit this year of having a far more secure left-flank, at least outside of New Hampshire where Huntsman is drifting upwards towards a spoiler-making 11-12%. But his right flank is far less divided than the one McCain faced in 2008. Then McCain faced not just Romney and Huckabee, but Fred Thompson as well in the early states. Romney at this point only seriously faces Gingrich and the tangentially relevant Ron Paul. Furthermore Gingrich, unlike Perry or Cain, has much greater potential to eat into Romney’s core constituencies among moderates, high-income voters, and libertarians. Neither Perry, nor Cain, nor Bachman, could ever have threatened Romney in New Hampshire. Gingrich, with an Iowa win behind him, could do a lot more damage there.
More worryingly, one of Romney’s problems from 2008 has reappeared. That year, the other candidates and campaigns went out of their way to unite against him for both personal and tactical reasons. The same is beginning to occur this year, as Romney has come under attack from multiple directions.
The very day after Thanksgiving, the Democratic National Committee began running an add accusing Mitt Romney of flip-flopping. The two items singled out, the healthcare mandate and abortion, are unlikely to be costly in a general election, but they are not meant for that audience. The clear intent of the Democrats is to sink Romney in the primary.
At the same time, the Union Leader Endorsement was picked up not just by Gingrich, but leading unaffiliated Republican operatives and other campaigns. Mike Dennehy, a leading McCain operative has turned into a virtual Gingrich spokesman, while the Huntsman campaign retweeted the endorsement, and has been promoting it in its own press releases. At first this may seem strange, but many of these operatives, having picked the wrong horse now find themselves facing the prospect of being frozen out of a Romney campaign and potential administration. An understaffed Gingrich campaign offers much greater professional prospects. That many of these staffers now allying themselves from Gingrich worked for McCain, and therefore have enjoyed years of enmity with Team Romney, only adds to their motivation.
Finally, the media itself, anxious for a more interesting general election, has helped turn the Gingrich surge into a self-fulfilling prophecy, reporting on it wildly.
It is impossible at this point to say Gingrich is the front-runner. Regardless of polls, his campaign is a shell, and he has imploded several times before. But he is now the odds-on favorite in Iowa, where as Huckabee proved, money is far less valuable than passion. And he is a far better match for New Hampshire than either Perry or Cain ever were, being a maverick politically if not ideologically.
For Romney and his campaign, the critical days will be those between a Gingrich victory in Iowa and the New Hampshire primary. Romney, like McCain did, will have firewall of Northeast and West Coast states after Super Tuesday if he can survive that long. What he cannot survive is for Gingrich to win four of the five early contests, such a development, given the bandwagon way Republican primaries work, would probably make Gingrich the favorite for the nomination. Romney is probably still slightly favored, but in many ways Gingrich is a far scarier opponent than Rick Perry ever was.
Comments (2)
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I think a key difference between Romney 2008 and Romney 2012 is that Romney 2008 was seen as a 'nasty' campaign - the personal attacks on very likable people like Huckabee made him resented. It was quite similar to the way Portillo's 2001 Tory leadership campaign behaved - nasty, arrogant and lacking the degree of charm and sense of humour that made the man himself popular in the first place.
That side of him went through the party so much that even though Romney did a great job of spinning against the Dems at the convention there was simply no way McCain would have picked him to be the VP nominee.
Romney 2012 has learnt from the errors of 2008 and I think that will ensure he gets the nomination.
04/12/2011 19:13I agree Gareth, the 2008 Campaign had in many ways the inverse of the problems the McCain effort had. McCain behaved like an insurgent when he wasn't, and continued to even after the nomination. Romney's effort behaved like a front-running campaign even when its poll-rankings did not support it.
They have learned a lot of lessons this year, but a bit of the "nasty" problem remains not because they are nasty per se, but because the Romney campaign is being run as a serious effort.
Basically part of the problem with the Republican Primaries in recent years is that they occur on two levels. On one level you have the campaign itself made up of endorsements, organization, door to door campaigning, staff hires etc.
On the other you have the debates, interviews, media appearances and for the staff involved in campaigns, the fun of being part of such an effort.
The increasingly media driven nature of campaigns means its increasingly possible for people to engage in the second, media-driven half of campaigning without doing the hard work of the first part. People like Gingrich and Huckabee can run efforts based almost entirely on showing up to debates and being interviewed.
This produces tension. Romney, running what to him seems like a traditional campaign, is a bit disdainful of their efforts, and in turn they return the disdain. Furthermore this filters down to the staff level, where Romney staff have contempt for the "amateurs" who work for people like Gingrich, and those kids dislike the Romney effort.
The result is that the whole thing rapidly turns into Romney v. the field, not just in the debates, but also on the ground.
Ironically Hillary had a lot of the same problems in 2008.
Right now though Romney has a problem. He needs to end this narrative, and with two debates left, either he, or preferably the other candidates have to go after Gingrich. The problem of course is that if he does so it risks looking like it did when he went after Huckabee.
I suspect the best option is to remind everyone of how they feel about Obama, and of exactly how much of a stronger nominee Romney would be in the general election. Implicitly this would remind everyone of Gingrich's problems without explicitly bringing them up or attacking him.
04/12/2011 19:42