A battered and bruised Newt Gingrich continued to slip in Florida pre-primary polls Sunday, dropping 12 -15 percentage points behind surging frontrunner Mitt Romney, depending on the survey.
Even an endorsement from former candidate and fellow adulterer Herman Cain couldn’t stem the momentum shift to Romney as Gingrich struggled to stop the defections.
Said Gingrich on Fox News Sunday:
He has a basic policy of carpet-bombing his opponent. I give Gov. Romney’s campaign due respect for the sheer volume of negativity that they use and the sheer amount of money they raise on Wall Street.
Romney responded by suggesting Gingrich look at himself in the mirror before throwing stones.
Says Romney:
My own view is that the reason Speaker Gingrich has been having a hard time in Florida is the people of Florida have watched the debates and listened to the speaker, have listen3ed to the other candidates, and have said “You know what? Mitt Romney’s the guy we’re gonna support.”
Romney’s return to the top of the polls is a sharp reversal of the momentum that Gingrich expected to carry over from his upset win in the South Carolina primary. A poor debate performance and renewed focus on the former Speaker’s philandering and ethics problems have brought his campaign back to political reality.
“Voters are taking a harder look at Gingrich and realize he is a flawed choice,” GOP strategist Alan Holcomb tells Capitol Hill Blue. Holcomb, who is not aligned with any of the remaining four candidates in the GOP field, says Gingrich can’t become the conservative alternative to Romney.
“The Speaker has too much baggage, too many skeletons and too many ‘shoot from the lip’ moments. He plays well with the fringe but that’s not enough to carry the day, ” Holcomb says.
“Time is not Gingrich’s friend,” says conservative columnist George Will. “The more time he has the more he talks and the more he talks the more he gets into trouble.”
With one day to go, polls show Romney leading in every key demographic in Florida, including seniors and Hispanics.
The polls also deliver bad news for the GOP’s other two remaining candidates: former Pennsylvania Senator Rick Santorum and Texas Congressman Ron Paul. Santorum is a distant third and Paul brings up the rear. Santorum canceled his weekend campaign schedule to be in Pennsylvania with his sick daughter and Paul, his campaign foundering, has abandoned Florida to concentrate on upcoming caucus states.
“Santorum will be out before much longer,” Holcomb says. “Paul has once again become the Australia of the primary season. Everybody knows he’s down there but nobody really cares all that much.”
Related articles
- Consensus of Polls: It’s Romney in Tuesday’s Florida Republican Primary (themoderatevoice.com)
- Gingrich Attacks Romney Ahead Of Florida Vote (npr.org)
- NBC/Marist Poll: Romney Up 15 Points Over Gingrich (themoderatevoice.com)
- Mitt Romney roars into double-digit lead in Florida: polls (vancouversun.com)
- Romney Leads Gingrich Ahead Of Florida’s Primary (npr.org)
6 thoughts on “Romney showing strength on eve of Florida primary”
Here’s something else the Founding Fathers never envisioned except maybe Ben Franklin who was studying electricity. Morse didn’t think of the telegraph until 1837, and in fact there was no electricity. Edison and Marconi came alone in the late 1800s. It wasn’t until 1880 that Edison patented the light bulb.
Radio began to blanket the country in the 1920s and politics changed forever.
Until then only those who actually attended campaign events and spread reports of them via word of mouth and those who read newspapers could be persuaded to vote for candidates. This was obviously a select group.
Then along came movies and the news shorts that came with them. Hitler used this means of persuasion to great effect. The first television campaign ads were aired in 1952 when Eisenhower/Nixon beat Stevenson/Sparkman in a landslide.
Then we have the televised debates.
Nixon went on to loose to Kennedy in part because the former came across so poorly in the televised debates.
The Founding Fathers were smart, they were visionaries. But did they think about how science would change politics? Keep in mind Jules Verne, considered the first science fiction author, didn’t start writing until the 1860s.
How could they have thought about Hitler and Goebels and the The Reich Ministry of Public Enlightenment and Propaganda (German: Reichsministerium für Volksaufklärung und Propaganda or Propagandaministerium)? How could they have thought about the influence of a Fox News and talk radio, and political ads produced by the advertising companies who once convinced a nation that smoking was healthy?
Even Ben Franklin, as far as I know, didn’t write about what would happen when millions of voters would go to the ballot box with their heads filled with lies and half-truths about the candidates. Considering that his “General Magazine” was the first ever to publish advertising he could and thought about how advertising would grow and eventually used to sell candidates.
In Ancient Egypt, the pharoah was considered a god. The pharoah, being a god, claimed power over the Nile River, promising its yearly flooding and everlasting abundance prosperity for the Egyptian people.
Then the Nile stopped flooding and the dessert crept in, turning once ferile farmland to so much sand and dust. And the people starved.
They found out that the pharoah was no more god than themselves.
And they revolted.
When will the American People realize that our dear leaders are not gods, and the Nile of government largesse will dry up one day?
It’s already happening.
We are doomed to the mediocrity of the major parties. George Washington was right.
How long until we decide to abandon the “official” vote rigging and have our own citizen led elections?
Thanks Woody188 for this most appropriate Washington quote on the eve of a primary election. No truer words of warning were ever written and now seemingly have come to fruition.
So too another President closer to our times, Dwight D. Eisenhower warned us of the impending dangers of an evergrowing “Military Industrial Complex” that so too has been instrumental in the unraveling of our nation’s fabric. He warned us, but no one listened; the same as President Washington’s farewell address several hundred years ago.
I’m providing a link to Ike’s farewell address. There’s a vidclip to view to listen to his warnings that have been obviously ignored by our citizenry, thus turning America into a pariah among nation’s; I.E., a nation who’s thirst for empire is virtually destroying itself with a now out of control process of endless warring adventurism; I.E., zero sum wars simply for capital gain, simply for the benefit of the few at the expense of the many.
https://www.npr.org/2011/01/17/132942244/ikes-warning-of-military-expansion-50-years-later
So between partisan engineered, election related fraud and corruption along with a commitment to maintaining a ‘professional military’ engaged in expanding our influence across the globe regardless of the loss of lives and and disastrous public relations with other nations; we are seemingly headed towards the midnight of our destruction as a nation.
Only candidate Ron Paul is addressing the termination of our involvement in these “Orwellian” permawars anywhere and everywhere while the other guys, the so-called ‘frontrunners’ will provide us with more of the same in spades no doubt, all to our eventual financial undoing as a nation. We’re in the sweephand mode to the midnight of our destruction. Believe it…! : |
Carl Nemo **==
One might have thought that Romney wouldn’t need to seek the “levers of power” to further feather his nest, but a serious look at his past and his current attacks on any and all challengers shows him for the scurrilous (deleted) he truly is.
If nothing else becomes clear in this high, holy election season of politicians gone wild for themselves… elephants and asses both… surely know that we are all (deleted).
And it’s so-called “news” outlets that should shoulder the greatest percentage of the blame.
(Edited to remove obscenities)
Romney, comparing Gingrich to Goldilocks, had nothing to do with the qualifications of Gingrich. What relevance does it have that Gingrich complains about the audience responses being too enthusiastic or not enthusiastic enough.
I think it was silly, to put it mildly, for Gingrich to make those statement. But then Newt isn’t known for thinking about the consequences of saying something before he blurts it out. I rather doubt that as president Gingrich would have a hissy fit and open the football and press the button.
“Politic’s ain’t beanbags” Romney said yesterday.
Beanbags?
Aside from the fact that it is a poor comparison since beanbags is a game where the bags are thrown into a board with holes in it, what Romney and Gingrich are throwing at each other are hardly bags filled with beans. Decorum prevents me from suggesting what they are filled with.
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