The Battle of Tampa Bay
Daniel Berman thinks Mitt Romney should abandon his opposition after the Florida primary.
31 Jan 2012, 09:30
Mitt Romney: Time to take on Obama?
Last summer, in the midst of the excitement over Rick Perry’s entry into the race for the Republican nomination, it was suggested that everything in the end would come down to Florida. And while the personalities in some cases changed, in the end Florida’s centrality, as the largest and last of the “first primaries” has ensured that it will for all practical purposes be Newt Gingrich’s last stand.
The simple reality is that despite his victory in South Carolina, and regardless of the panic over Romney’s prospect that flooded the media a week ago following his loss to Gingrich in South Carolina, Gingrich always had a very narrow window of opportunity. While South Carolina brought him, or more accurately his Super PAC another $5 million infusion from Vegas Billionaire Sheldon Adelson, the donation simply reiterated exactly how dependent Newt Gingrich’s entire campaign has been and still is on a number of donors who can be counted on one hand. The fact is that while Romney is the uncontested choice of the GOP donor base, Gingrich has been running on fumes financially for most of the campaign, and Florida is the last place he can compete seriously on any sort of financial level.
And “compete” in this context is being used in an extremely limited context. As of Saturday, Newt Gingrich’s campaign and his SuperPAC had combined spent a bit under $4 Million dollars , which was dwarfed by the more than $16 million spent by Mitt Romney and his own Super PAC, most of which was on negative ads. For all the discussion of Gingrich’s poor performances in debates this past week, evidence from opinion polls is that it was this disparity in spending that has caused Gingrich’s crash over the last few days.
In fact, for all the talk about debates this entire campaign, spending has tended to trump them. Newt Gingrich’s initial surge in Iowa was derailed by $15 million in attack ads from the Romney and Paul campaigns, while his victory in South Carolina occurred in an environment in which Romney’s reluctance to fully invest in the state allowed him to reach parity in overall spending.
In Florida by contrast, the Romney campaign and allied groups began to spend heavily the moment Gingrich pulled into contention in South Carolina. Therefore even at the time of his brief 48 hour surge, Gingrich’s favorability numbers were already falling. And this sort of of resource imbalance is why the primaries will likely be all but over in the event of an increasingly likely Romney victory.
While Romney almost certainly lacks the money to repeat this sort of pattern on Super Tuesday in a dozen states as once, if he wins Florida he will likely not have to. With no more debates for weeks, and few sources of funding its hard to see how Gingrich remains relevant until those states vote on March 6th. Between Florida and that date lie a series of unappealing primaries and caucuses, Nevada, Arizona, Minnesota, and Maine of which Gingrich is likely to be seriously competitive in Minnesota. And the limited battlefield means Romney will be able to atomize Gingrich before he has the chance to compete seriously.
Therefore with a win in Florida, Romney will be able to do something he wanted to do since before South Carolina – declare the primaries over and drop out of future debates. Gingrich, Santorum and Paul may keep sending out press releases in such a context, but the assumption team Romney is operating under is that few will pay attention to them without the benefit of debates to highlight their existence or money to make their presence felt in their absence.
Romney wants to end the primaries for a simple reason. As much as he has had a good week in Florida over the last seven days, his previous two weeks in South Carolina were damaging. From unsuccessful attacks on Bain, Gingrich and his allies, and more importantly a hostile media found a narrative that did real damage in the form of Romney’s tax reforms. Romney despite running for President for the second time, and having been a national figure for the better part of a decade is still largely undefined, and in the vital battle he faces between being known as an “Entrepreneur” or a “Rich Businessman” he seemed to be losing. Part of this was because the debates provided an opportunity for the moderators to ask questions in a manner in which Romney was forced to appear evasive regardless of the truth of his position, but the fact that many of the attacks were coming from fellow Republicans added to the frontrunner’s problems. In the general election campaign the full force of the Conservative media will behind Romney, and as such media efforts to bring up issues like his tax returns would meet a concerted counter-attack. In the context of the primary however, Romney faced attackers united across ideological lines by a desire to destroy him.
While some have argued that a longer primary can be positive, pointing to how Barrack Obama benefitted from long primary against Hillary Clinton, this comparison ignores the differences between the races. In 2008, the Clinton-Obama showdown was one of giants, with hundreds of millions of dollars spent on voter registration, turnout operations, and voter contact. In 2012 by contrast only one candidate is running a serious campaign, namely Mitt Romney, with Newt Gingrich and Rick Santorum barely existing beyond showing up to debates to attack Romney. Granted Romney has greatly improved his debating skills in the last week, but Gingrich has recently found an additional and dangerous purpose, that of providing a conduit for Vegas Billionaire Sheldon Adelson to channel 10 million dollars into brutal attack ads on Mitt Romney. The fact that Newt Gingrich’s Super PAC is all but dependent on one donor is concerning, but more concerning is the motive. Despite Adelson’s public requests that the money not be used for attacks, it has gone to ads that seem more a dry run for the general election than primary tactics. Having hit Romney for destroying jobs at Bain in South Carolina, the money is now going to ads hitting Romney for supposed Medicare fraud in Florida.
As a consequence, Romney has a vested interest in ending the campaign as soon as possible, which 10 point or greater Florida victory would provide an excuse to do. At the very least it would allow Governor Romney to attack Obama at his victory speech, and then proceed on a triumphal lap through February pretending his opposition does not exist. By the time Super Tuesday rolls around, it may well turn out that everyone believed Gingrich was left behind in Tampa Bay.
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