Hard Choices on the Path to Feb. 5

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GOP Candidates Storm Florida

With just two days before the crucial Florida primary, the GOP candidates are storming the sunshine state. (Jan 27)

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Given the bevy of battlegrounds, generating news coverage will also become a key strategy of the campaigns, because it would cost each of them about $35 million to run a week of ads in all 21 states.

McCain's schedule reflects this approach. After Wednesday's debate, he will remain in California for another day before moving on to Illinois, New York, New Jersey and Massachusetts. His tour also includes a handful of fundraisers. The senator has raised at least $7 million since Jan. 1, and he regularly makes time to meet with donors.

After California, Giuliani's public schedule shows him giving a speech a couple of days later in Illinois, where aides think he is strong. Giuliani's advisers also say he may stop in Missouri, where he can count on the political organization of Sen. Christopher S. Bond, a longtime supporter.

But the former New York mayor will spend most of his time in the week leading up to the Feb. 5 primaries in the Northeast corridor, where he expects to do especially well, aides said.

Giuliani's plans are perhaps the most up in the air and will change according to the outcome of the Florida primary, aides said. A surprise victory might open the door to visits in other states, they said. A defeat probably would force him to pull back and concentrate on his home state, though recent polls show him struggling in New York as well as in California. His advisers have long suggested that both states are must-wins if he wants to secure the nomination.

A loss in Florida could also end Giuliani's campaign. Advisers say he will consider the downside to fighting on to Feb. 5, including the potential for an embarrassing loss in his home state, the likelihood that he could finish at the bottom in more than a dozen states and a lack of money to continue.

Huckabee is fighting the same perception problem that Giuliani faces, with donors wondering whether he remains viable. The former governor was hoping to raise $10 million by Feb. 5 on the strength of his win in Iowa. He has taken in less than $3 million, and though he once led in Florida, polls again show him in fourth.

So his campaign is beginning a last-ditch effort to make him the candidate of the South in the hopes of surviving beyond Feb. 5. With former senator Fred D. Thompson (Tenn.) now out of the race, Huckabee will cast himself as the candidate who best represents Southern and Midwestern values.

Huckabee's aides said they will rely in part on his base of evangelical Christians. He will stick to his populist economic message, which includes a proposal to replace the tax code with a national sales tax, and will emphasize his support for constitutional amendments banning same-sex marriage and abortion.

He will have to do it with a smaller organization. After a debilitating defeat in South Carolina, where his campaign had invested heavily in both time and money, it laid off close to a dozen staffers last week, asked others to start working without pay and decided not to run ads on broadcast channels in Florida.

Even with a poor showing in Florida, if Huckabee sweeps the South and the Midwest, and if Giuliani, Romney and McCain split victories in California, New York and other Feb. 5 states, he could collect enough delegates to remain competitive. But such a strategy supposes that the Florida victor will not have enough momentum to win nationwide and that Southern voters will not perceive the cash-strapped Huckabee as a candidate with little chance of winning.

"Huckabee would be a more familiar figure in many of these Southern states than other candidates, but his big problem is he's out of money, and increasingly he looks like a candidate who cannot win the nomination," said Merle Black, a politics and government professor at Emory University in Atlanta.

Staff writer Michael D. Shear, with the Giuliani campaign in Florida, contributed to this report.