Florida has gone from the state where former House Speaker Newt Gingrich might have extended his run at the Republican presidential nomination, to the place where the rules of political physics were exemplified.
Former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney lost the South Carolina primary in a big way. He allowed Gingrich to outflank him on the right, as the former Speaker dominated the debates and made Romney look silly on his then-unreleased tax returns. Romney clumsily answered questions about an issue that most Republican primary voters see as an asset: his wealth. The two went back and forth on TV — Gingrich with the help of a super PAC with a five million dollar contribution from Las Vegas Casino mogul Sheldon Adelson, and Romney with the same ample bankroll he’s had all along. And then Gingrich won by 13 points.
Newt took that lead and extended it into Florida — until electoral gravity took its toll.
Romney is up by exactly ten in our TPM Poll Average of the Republican race in the Sunshine State, and the former governor ran an extensive early voting program to boot, which encouraged supporters to vote ahead of time. The combination seems set to lead to a win for Romney, who would take all the delegates from Florida — 50 of the 1144 needed to win the Republican nod.
Righting the ship was a necessity for the Romney camp. They burst the Gingrich bubble once before after the former Speaker surged in December. When Romney and allied super PACs took Newt down with negative ads, the other states followed suit.
With Romney having the most most organized campaign and by far the most money, it was quite a coup for Gingrich to actually win in South Carolina — Newt’s campaign had already been declared dead with fourth place finishes in Iowa and New Hampshire. So the Gingrich victory in the Palmetto State exposed something essential for the Romney camp: Newt can actually pose a real challenge, despite a lack of money and campaign machinery.
So the Romney folks went to work. They released his tax returns a few days after the South Carolina defeat. They employed their edge in organizing with the early voting operation. They revamped the candidate’s debate skills — an aspect of the campaign Gingrich had dominated — and Romney totally outperformed Newt in the two Florida forums. They vastly outspent the Gingrich side in the most expensive state for media in the primary to date. And the Romney squad was helped along by classic Gingrich discipline problems — Newt ended up pandering to the Florida Space Coast in epic fashion, proposing that the United States build a manned base on the Moon.
A thorough victory for Romney tonight would confirm the campaign strategy that his camp has hoped to execute in 2012: inevitability. It’s been thoroughly noted that Romney isn’t the most electrifying candidate to the base in GOP history. But it seems his team is now benefiting big time from the laws of political gravity, pulling Mitt Romney up, and his opponents back down.
Kyle Leighton
Kyle is the Poll Editor at TPM. He graduated from Beloit College (WI) and began working in politics before getting an M.A. in magazine journalism from New York University, where he interned at TPM and the website of The New Yorker.
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