By Thomas Fitzgerald, The Philadelphia Inquirer –
PHLIADELPHIA — Perhaps it was appropriate that Newt Gingrich campaigned on the eve of Saturday’s Nevada caucuses at Stoney’s Rockin’ Country nightclub in Las Vegas, next to a mechanical bull, a contraption designed to shake-and-bake wannabe cowboys and fling them into the sawdust.
After blowout losses to Mitt Romney in the Florida primary last Tuesday and again in Nevada on Saturday, Gingrich will have to hang on tight for the next several weeks to keep his insurgent Republican presidential campaign going.
“This is a campaign of people power vs. money power,” the former House speaker said Friday, urging supporters to stick with him as he repeated his vow to continue fighting all the way to the Republican National Convention this August.
Beyond Nevada and Maine, where caucuses also began Saturday, five states will hold contests this month, and none of them is tailor-made for Gingrich, who had to lighten his campaign schedule in the Silver State to make fund-raising calls for the road ahead. Romney in 2008 won Colorado and Minnesota, which vote Tuesday. Missouri has a nonbinding primary that day as well. On Feb. 28 come primaries in Arizona and Michigan, Romney’s home state, where his father was governor in the 1960s.
In addition, there won’t be another candidates’ debate until Feb. 22, denying Gingrich the chance for free airtime in a forum that has been his strength in the campaign.
Gingrich’s strategy is to try to score a victory on Super Tuesday, March 6, when three Southern states vote — his native Georgia, plus Oklahoma and Tennessee — and to continue picking up delegates all through March under the proportional representation rules that the GOP adopted to try to slow down the nomination contest and give more states a chance for meaningful votes.
“There’ll be some breakthrough moments, but this is all about delegates, the blocking and tackling of presidential campaigns,” said Charlie Gerow, a Harrisburg-based GOP consultant who is organizing slates of delegates for Gingrich ahead of the April 24 Pennsylvania primary.
At any rate, because of the rule changes, it will be mathematically impossible for any candidate to clinch the 1,144 delegates needed to win the nomination before April. That gives Gingrich and the other remaining challengers, former Pennsylvania Sen. Rick Santorum and Texas Rep. Ron Paul, opportunities to sting Romney.
Theoretically, the front-runner could be denied a majority of the delegates by the end of the primary season in June, sending the contest to the floor of the convention, though that is considered unlikely.
Most GOP strategists consider the former Massachusetts governor to have the upper hand at this point, more able to wage campaigns on multistate fronts because of his superior organization and money advantage.
“There will continue to be a race, but it’s effectively over,” said Michael Hudome, a Republican media strategist. “It’s all about the momentum.”
Gingrich will be able to continue fighting, Hudome said, especially with timely cash infusions from billionaire casino owner Sheldon Adelson, who has funded the pro-Gingrich super PAC Winning our Future with $10 million so far.
But there are limits to how far a candidate-centric campaign with signs of disorganization can go. “From what I hear, being on Newt Gingrich’s staff is like being part of Saddam Hussein’s cabinet,” Hudome said.
Gingrich ultimately cannot win because he is viewed negatively by an overwhelming majority of voters, according to public opinion polls, said Lara Brown, a Villanova University political scientist who specializes in presidential nomination campaigns.
He has a market, Brown said, in the tea-party-affiliated grassroots conservatives who remain uncomfortable with Romney, though this group has not been able to unite around a single champion since 2008 vice presidential nominee Sarah Palin decided not to run.
“They’re big enough to cause a ruckus, but not to win, similar to Howard Dean’s ‘progressives’ in the 2004 Democratic race,” Brown said.
And Gingrich does not have sole claim on the most conservative GOP primary voters. Santorum has a strong base among social conservatives and has said he will keep going as long as he can. Santorum has a supportive super PAC, backed by billionaire mutual-fund investor Foster Friess.
Paul, the libertarian, can keep his campaign going with an enthusiastic but smallish base of support. He and his supporters don’t seem to count on winning the nomination, but want to have influence on the party.
Romney cruised to victory in Nevada on Saturday after several polls released in the last few days gave him leads of 20 points of more. It was also the first early-voting state with a significant population sharing his Mormon religion. In 2008 and again on Saturday, entrance polls found that about a quarter of caucus participants were members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. Romney won the votes of 95 percent of them four years ago, when overall, he got 51 percent of the caucus votes, and he drew nine in 10 of them Saturday.
Paul was highly organized in the state, which has a strong libertarian political tradition. He finished second in Nevada in the 2008 caucus.
Romney’s win in Nevada, on the heels of his Florida victory, marks the first time any of the 2012 candidates earned successive victories. For the first time in a modern GOP nominating contest, each of the first three states had a different victor: Santorum won the Jan. 3 Iowa caucuses, Romney won the New Hampshire primary on Jan. 10, and Gingrich won convincingly in South Carolina on Jan. 21.
Nevada’s caucuses awarded 28 delegates, divided proportionately among the candidates based on the percentage of votes they received.
The economy dominated the discussion in Nevada, which leads the nation with a 12.6 percent unemployment rate, as well as the highest rate of home foreclosures filed in 2011. Just over half the voters surveyed in an entrance poll Saturday conducted for the Associated Press and the television networks said the economy was the leading issue in their decision on whom to support.
Since Florida, Romney has barely mentioned Gingrich, instead focusing on President Barack Obama and making the case that his experience in business, as an investment banker, and as head of the organizing committee for the 2002 Winter Olympics in Salt Lake City before becoming Massachusetts governor best qualifies him to fix the economy.
Gingrich, though, has continued a harsh tone against Romney, saying the GOP has no chance in the fall if it nominates the man he calls “Obama lite.” Gingrich said at Stoney’s: “Obama is big food stamp. (Romney is) little food stamp. But they both think food stamps are OK.”
The increasingly bitter nomination battle has apparently taken a toll on Romney’s standing and that of the GOP as a whole, according to recent national polls, and some Republican leaders are eager to bring the contest to a close.
