DAYTONA BEACH SHORES -- Concluding a primary campaign which had become increasingly vicious and personal, Mitt Romney swept aside Newt Gingrich’s challenge and easily re-established himself as the front runner in the race for the GOP presidential nomination with 46.4% of the vote in the Sunshine State.
Gingrich finished a distant second with 31.9%, Rick Santorum was third with 13.4% and Ron Paul fourth with 7%.
Newt entered Florida fresh from his resounding victory over Romney in South Carolina and at fist looked as if he might confound expectations and win the day in Florida as well. But he peaked too soon and Romney’s massive advantages in money and organization eroded Gingrich’s lead on a daily basis.
Having learned from harsh attacks utilized by Gingrich in his South Carolina win, the two leaders traded a series of ever fiercer attack ads sponsored by their own campaigns and also by their respective “super-PAC’s.
Both men’s positions suffered, but Gingrich seemed to get the worst of it, especially within Florida’s large Hispanic community, which reacted very badly to exposure of Gingrich’s earlier remarks to the effect that Spanish is a language of the ghetto.
By his standards, Gingrich spent heavily in Florida, in recognition of its size, the diversity of its Republican voter base and the complexity of its multiple media markets. But Romney outspent him by a factor of four and buried the Gingrich campaign under a massive blanket of oftimes ferocious TV attack ads.
At the same time Romney held an insuperable advantage in organization, which had been in place for years and was honed to a fighting edge, while that of Gingrich at times seemed somewhat haphazard, perhaps unavoidably as it was assembled hurriedly in comparison.
In earlier essays, I have stressed that money and organization win elections. The Florida Republican Primary of 2012 was no exception. By the time the voting began on January 31st, all the polls were predicting a convincing Romney victory.
All of Romney’s campaign tactics and advantages seem to have borne fruit in Florida as he defeated Gingrich in every category of voter measured by the exit pollers except for the very conservative. As a result, it would seem that Republicans, though still indicating that their support for Romney is not strongly enthusiastic, are becoming more comfortable with the idea of Mitt Romney as the Party’s standard bearer against Obama in November.
Recognizing the paucity of their organizations and the emptiness of their wallets, the other two GOP candidates, Santorum and Paul, each gave Florida a once-over lightly and moved on to upcoming caucus contests where less money and greater enthusiasm might still offer them a significant harvest of delegates. Even there however, Romney enjoys a huge advantage.
His closest rival, Newt Gingrich, is sitting on a war chest of about $2 million but he also has about $1 million in debts. Romney, by contrast, has some $19 million in his campaign coffers and can once again overwhelm Gingrich and the other two with cash. To make matters worse for them, Romney will enjoy the support of Nevada’s considerable Mormon minority.
Romney is popular in Maine and even more so in Michigan, where he was a boy and where his father George was a popular governor. Arizona and Minnesota may offer some opportunity to Mitt’s rivals, but wins in those two caucus states would barely slow the Romney train.
The fact is the Florida has moved the contest from one in which the media is the primary determinant to one in which delegate numbers really begin to matter. Florida awards 50 delegates, all to the winner. But the three preceding contests all award their delegates proportionally, as do all other primaries and caucuses until April first. Iowa has not even begun to choose its convention delegates, nor will it until later in the summer.
Romney will have about 87 delegates after Florida while Gingrich is a far distant second with about 36. Yet it takes 1144 delegates to win and almost 94% of the convention’s delegates have yet to be won by any of the candidates. The five primaries and caucuses which mark the month of February have few delegates to offer but March is “Super Tuesday" with a plethora and primaries and caucuses.
Romney will enter that important series of contests with a significant delegate lead and the money and organization it will take to win most or all of them. His opponents will not.
All three have pledged to stay in the race until the convention, positions which (if they are not abandoned) will ensure that Romney will have an easier time of it against a divided opposition vote in the primaries and caucuses to come.
With his convincing win in Florida, Romney has regained the mantle of inevitable front runner, a status which had been called into question by Newt Gingrich in South Carolina. Romney could always stumble, but at this point it would appear that his hold on the GOP presidential nomination grows firmer by the day.
NSB News is a 24/7 Internet newspaper in New Smyrna Beach accessed through NSBNews.net and VolusiaNews.net, launched April 7, 2008, by award-winning breaking news and investigative reporter Henry Frederick and award-winning blogger Peter Mallory. It is the first fully-online newspaper in Florida and among the few in the nation with continuous editorial content picked up by Google News Directories.
