Because of his victory in New Hampshire, he arrived in South Carolina with expectations running beyond reality. But the Palmetto State turned out to be everything Romney and his team had feared. Former House speaker Newt Gingrich tapped into an electorate angry at President Obama and caught fire.
Romney appeared out of step during the entire campaign there, bedeviled by questions about his tax returns and uncertain whether to focus on the president or Gingrich. South Carolina voters did what Romney advisers had feared, giving Gingrich an unexpectedly wide margin and leaving Republicans to wonder about the vulnerabilities of a candidate who only 10 days earlier had been called the inevitable nominee.
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The Washington Post's Rosalind Helderman looks at the numbers behind Mitt Romney's victory in the Florida primary. (Jan. 31)
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Pre-game analysis: The GOP presidential field heads to Nevada for its “first in the west” caucuses on Feb. 4.
The question on the night of the South Carolina primary was whether it was a temporary setback, which many front-runners have experienced, or the beginning of an unraveling for the former governor. In Boston, Romney’s advisers were determined to prove that it was the former. They had been getting ready for Florida for months.
Florida wasn’t the first swing state on the calendar; Iowa and New Hampshire will both be contested in November. But the Sunshine State was the first to approximate the nation as a whole: a large, diverse, complex state with one of the highest unemployment rates and an economy battered by the housing foreclosure crisis. That made it the most important of the early-voting states.
Florida was ready-made for Romney in several ways. Its economic problems played to his background in private business. The state’s history as one of the most competitive general-election battlegrounds heightened the importance for Republican voters of finding a candidate they believed could defeat Obama. The state’s diversity meant that no single faction of the GOP could dominate the primary.
Romney had one other major advantage: a political war chest that dwarfed that of any of his rivals. But this was not accidental. It had been baked into the campaign’s calculations and preparations from the beginning.
Talk to any Republican or Democratic strategist who has run a race in Florida, and they will tell you the state sucks up money like almost no other general-election battleground. Romney poured millions into Florida and started long before all the candidates arrived after South Carolina. He spent freely on ads that savaged Gingrich. He was aided by millions more spent by Restore Our Future, a super PAC supporting his candidacy.
The months and months Romney devoted last year to raising money, the time he took going from fundraiser to fundraiser, the hours he spent on airplanes flying from one coast to another and back again in the space of a week were all designed to put him in position to run the kind of campaign in Florida that a winning candidate must run. He had money for ads and money for an organization that could turn out early and absentee voters.
If Florida was a mismatch, it was not just because Romney became aggressive or performed better than his rivals in the debates. The Florida primary was a lopsided campaign because only he had done what was necessary in advance. No wonder Gingrich was flailing in the final days before the vote.
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