THERE WILL probably be only one viable Republican presidential hopeful left after next Tuesday’s Florida primary, though the loser will limp on for some time, especially if the race is close.
Mitt Romney and Newt Gingrich are virtually tied for first place in opinion polls here. But two surveys in as many days have shown Romney would tie with or defeat Barack Obama in Florida next November – an important consideration for Republican voters. The same polls showed Gingrich losing to Obama by a significant margin.
Like Sarah Palin before him, Gingrich also has a “favourability” problem. A core of fervent supporters adore “Newt”, but he alienates more people than he seduces.
A Fox News poll shows 56 per cent of Americans have an unfavourable opinion of the former speaker of the House; only 27 per cent a positive opinion.
In Florida, more votes are at stake than in the previous three contests in Iowa, New Hampshire and South Carolina combined.
With a population of 18.6 million, and 11.2 million registered voters, Florida is tied with New York for third place, after California and Texas, in the electoral college.
Two-thirds of Florida’s population were born elsewhere, and its politics are imported from throughout the US, the Caribbean and Latin America. It prides itself on being a melting pot and a microcosm of America.
“Florida is representative of America as a whole,” says Prof Susan Mac Manus, a native of Tampa and one of the state’s leading political scientists and historians who is attached to the University of South Florida.
“Its racial, ethnic, religious and demographic diversity mirror national statistics.”
The state has substantial populations of African-Americans and Hispanics. Its residents are Protestant, Catholic, Jewish and Muslim. Unlike Iowa and South Carolina, mainstream Protestants outnumber evangelicals. Like the rest of the country, Florida’s population is rural and suburban, with an urban core.
If a Republican wants to raise $1 million overnight, he goes to Naples, in southwest Florida, an old saying has it, while for the same purpose a Democrat goes to Palm Beach.
Florida is a playground for senior citizens, who are healthier, better educated and wealthier than their counterparts in the rest of the country, Mac Manus says.
Florida’s west coast is Republican, allegedly because sun-starved retirees drove down the I-75 on the Gulf coast from Michigan, Ohio and Pennsylvania.
With the exception of an enclave of right-wing pundits led by the radio host Rush Limbaugh in Palm Beach, the eastern, Atlantic coast was populated by Democrats because they drove down the I-95 from Massachusetts, New Jersey and New York.
Florida’s 9.9 per cent unemployment exceeds the 8.5 per cent national average.
“In earlier slowdowns, Florida was the first to rebound, but this time it’s lagging, and that worries people,” says Mac Manus.
The housing crash hit the state particularly hard, and mortgage foreclosures are among the highest in the nation. Romney has sought to tie Gingrich to the foreclosures, emphasising his work for the hated lender Freddie Mac, for which he was paid up to $1.8 million.
Divisions in social class could determine the contest between Gingrich and Romney.
Polls show the older, more educated and affluent a Floridian is, the more likely he or she is to vote for Romney. It is, as Politico website put it yesterday, “the Tea Party against the cocktail party”.
The Republican strategist Alex Castellanos told Politico: “The Romney campaign has been the cucumber sandwiches on silver trays campaign. Newt is running a torches and pitchforks campaign.
“Who do you think Republicans would want to storm the castle with? When you’re storming the castle you don’t care if your leader has slept around, is on his 50th wife – you just want somebody who says, ‘Let’s go kill them!’”
Gingrich exploits the perception of Romney as a “country club Republican” and a traitor to the conservative cause. Both are tip-toeing around the extremely sensitive issue of immigration, which divides the party and the Hispanic community that accounts for 11 per cent of Republican voters in Florida.
In one fell swoop, Gingrich managed to mock Romney’s wealth, President Obama and Romney’s suggestion that illegal immigrants should “self-deport”: “You have to live in a world of Swiss bank accounts and Cayman Islands accounts and automatic $20 million-a-year income with no work to have some fantasy this far from reality,” he said in Doral, Florida.
“For Romney to believe that somebody’s grandmother is going to be so cut off that she’s going to self-deport, this is an Obama-level fantasy.”
Gingrich, however, indulged in a little fantasy himself, promising supporters near the space centre at Cape Canaveral that he would establish a colony on the moon and build a spacecraft for Mars by his second term.
Gingrich suffered a setback when he had to withdraw a Florida attack advertisement that accused Romney of hating immigrants. The ad was denounced by the popular Cuban-American senator from Florida, Marco Rubio.
There are more than 200 Tea Party groups across the state, and although they have not officially endorsed a candidate, most of their supporters favour Gingrich. The yellow “Don’t Tread on Me” Gadsden flag associated with the Tea Party flies at Gingrich rallies, which draw more people than Romney’s staid events.
Florida tea parties fall into three currents, Prof Mac Manus says: libertarians, who want the government out of their lives and for whom privacy is the main issue; strict constitutionalists, who believe the government has strayed from the ideals of the Founding Fathers; and those whose children cannot meet mortgage payments and are terrified by the prospect of economic collapse.
Anger is one thing these tea party factions share, and Gingrich has channelled that emotion.
“They’re angry and scared, and Newt Gingrich does what all of them would like to do,” Mac Manus says: “Tell Washington to go F itself.”
But Gingrich is creating panic in the Republican party. William Kristol, the editor of the conservative Weekly Standard, has pleaded for weeks for another candidate to join the Republican race.
If Gingrich wins Florida, such pleas are likely to become more insistent, and could deliver the coup de graceto Romney.
Former Florida governor Jeb Bush yesterday published an opinion piece in the Washington Post, warning the Republican party that it must change policies to win the Hispanic vote, which could be decisive in 15 swing states. Bush and Senator Rubio are two Republicans often mentioned as possible "white knights" to deliver the party from the Mitt/Newt dichotomy. Both have refused to endorse either candidate.
Yesterday, the conservative Drudge report published links to anti-Gingrich tirades in the National Reviewand American Spectator,recounting Gingrich's poor relations with Ronald Reagan and portraying him as a Clinton-like fraudster and womaniser. "Re-elect Obama, Vote Newt!" the Florida-based columnist Anne Coulter warned on her website. "Hot-headed arrogance is neither conservative nor attractive to voters."
