The Florida Republican Primary: Kosher Meals, Super PACs, and the Importance of Momentum

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No one could’ve seen this coming.

The shock was palpable at Newt Gingrich’s campaign headquarters in Orlando last night – interns gathering up canvassing strategy notebooks, the high pitched squeals of desks and chairs being moved, and an almost smothering cloud of disbelief hanging over it all. Newt could not get out of the state fast enough, departing for Nevada as soon as generic post-loss “I Will Fight On” speech concluded. Despite the millions of dollars, his “sugar daddy” PAC[1] and that indomitable Gingrich haircut, Newt lost. And it wasn’t even close.

What happened? Gingrich’s campaign – left for dead after imploding in June 2011 and early January – stormed back from the precipice with a huge win in the South Carolina Primary a mere 10 days ago. Everything was going Newt’s way. He was finally wooing the center-right Republican voters that had shied away from his campaign at its onset, and solidifying his base among the religious right. Meanwhile, Mitt Romney’s campaign began to resemble a bouncy-bounce that had been hit by an artillery shell.

Yet, slowly, everything began to shift Romney’s way. Polls put him more and more in front of Gingrich despite sincere efforts by the later to rip out the former’s heart. Romney was accused of denying Kosher food to Holocaust survivors, being an enemy to religious freedom, and essentially being a rich upper-class white guy[2]. Romney launched his fair share of counter-attacks, but it was Gingrich’s rhetoric that dominated the run-up to the primary. Newt had his time to shine – his biggest and best opportunity to snatch control of the race, potentially for good.

It is fair to wonder if the aggressiveness and hostility that has personified Gingrich’s approach to this primary finally caught up to him. It has won him the adoration of Tea-Party and far-right voters; an adoration that seemingly goes hand-in-hand with subsequent rejection by middle-right and mainstream Republicans. Regardless, Florida voters got an up-close-and-personal look at Newt Gingrich – and voted overwhelmingly for The Other Guy, a walking hybrid of the Republican “Establishment” and those guys in Cialis commercials. Romney now leads Gingrich 84-27 in Republican delegates captured. This race is far from over, as Newt himself has vowed, but whatever advantage the Gingrich campaign gained in South Carolina has been cleaned out and stacked in neat piles somewhere in an Orlando auditorium.