Sorry, my point was hypothetical and assumed that Romney kept Gingrich from getting into the race at all, so then not as much enmity between Gingrich and Romney. Not that there is probably any chance that Romney could have persuaded Gingrich to stay on the sidelines.
He may have a point about the Republican establishment, albeit an ironic one since for many years he WAS the Republican establishment. Even more delicious is that, since in my opinion much of the deterioration in political discourse in the US is a direct result of Gingrich’s plan to bully and attack liberals and progressives; now that he’s getting his with it he doesn’t much like it. It’s like the bully getting sand kicked in his face by a bigger, better funded bully.
Mitt has always been inevitable, if only for the money and organization reasons.
The question is whether Newt, Santorum, and Paul hold out to try to deny Mitt enough delegates to win outright at the convention. That seems highly unlikely, but with more proportional states it’s vaguely possible. Even Florida should be proportional, and Newt could potential raise a stink about that.
At some point (maybe now?) Newt’s big-money backer will cool off. I heard this morning that Mitt has about $20 million cash on hand and no debt. Newt has about $2 million and $1 million in debt. It’s not even close to a fair fight.
They don’t. And it doesn’t help that Gingrich and Santorum both seem to be running very low on money. Based on posts here and reports, I think Gingrich had $2.1 million in the bank and Santorum had $1.1 million. Maybe they can each raise a little more money through last-ditch emails, but it seems like they’re both close to the end. Santorum in particular since he’s been eclipsed as the “conservative alternative” candidate.
You think they’ll both drop out? I’m not so sure. Newt in particular doesn’t seem the quitting type. If you look at his campaign as more of a book tour anyways then it doesn’t make a ton of sense to drop out as long as the contributions remain high enough to keep up an event schedule.
I think Santorum holds out for the (non-binding) MO primary (where Newt is off the ballot). It’s his one chance to say “I can beat Romney if Newt just drops out”. I don’t think it’ll happen but it’s telling that Rick is the only GOP candidate that’s even come here so far.
And obviously Ron is in it until the end. He did the same in 2004 with much lower levels of support, so why not get as many delegates as you can and keep building the movement for Rand?
They’re both pretty close to broke and it’s becoming more and more obvious they can’t win. How long are people going to keep giving them money in that situation?
Newt super-pac has been living off one rich donor for the last month or more (something like 10 million over the last month). Presumably Newt can keep the anti-Romney ads going as long as that wallet stays open and is out of luck once it shuts.
So I guess the question is how much money one eighty year old billionaire is willing to throw after a lost cause.
I’m not sure if Santorum can even hang around to Super Tuesday. I agree the main question for Gingrich is how much money Sheldon Adelson wants to spend. He’s very rich and he may believe in Gingrich with all his heart, but if Romney wins practically everything over the next couple of weeks or the month, all Adelson’s money won’t make much difference anyway.
It’s also pretty clear that Romney still can’t win the southern white evangelical vote. Gingrich carried the panhandle and won that segment. He could win a few southern states in March no problem. You don’t really need that much money to keep campaigning, just to put up large numbers of ads.
The bigger problem for Newt and Rick is if the media stops covering them. Ron Paul doesn’t care about that because the media never covered him anyways (to their shame, IMO).
But the ads are a waste of your time and effort if you don’t have enough of an organization to get people to come out and vote for you. Evangelical voters may not be very enthusiastic about Romney, but I don’t think there are enough of them to keep Gingrich competitive, and even if he managed to win a few states, Romney would have the opportunity to keep winning more states and delegates and bringing in more money. How does that turn things around for Gingrich? Based on the amount of songs Romney is singing in all of his speeches, it looks like he doesn’t think he has to do much more to win. He just needs to not screw up.
Oh, absolutely. Barring a huge revelation Romney will win.
But Newt’s ego is certainly enough to keep him on a glorified book tour of a campaign, particularly if he can tap into to a certain segment of the vote to keep him viable in a few contests. Winning (even individual states) is its own reward, ya know?
I’m sure things will change in the next couple of days, but Gingrich still leads the national polls and in a few states that have been polled. The question is whether the Mitt ad-bombs will destroy that lead everywhere - I think it likely will, with the small exception of southern evangelical-dominated states.
Who are these rich donors who are willing to back Newt’s fight-the-money-power message?! I’m guessing George Soros and Warren Buffet ain’t on the list. Is this Sheldon Adelson some kinda crypto-Commie who kept it carefully hidden all his life up to now?!
I’m not saying Gingrich will quit because he doesn’t have the ego to keep campaigning. I’m saying he has very little chance of winning and he’s going to run out of money at some point, and how is he going to keep campaigning after that?
Not really.
Yeah, that doesn’t mean anything. We’ll see what the polls that are taken post-Florida look like. It looks like he is going to have trouble winning any of the states that are voting or caucusing in February, and he’s probably going to fall further behind nationally and in the later states as the campaign progresses and Romney’s money starts doing its work. I’m not saying Gingrich is going to quit tomorrow, but how long is he going to be able to keep this up?
Who are these rich donors who are willing to back Newt’s fight-the-money-power message?! I’m guessing George Soros and Warren Buffet ain’t on the list. Is this Sheldon Adelson some kinda crypto-Commie who kept it carefully hidden all his life up to now?!
I’m saying he has very little chance of winning and he’s going to run out of money at some point, and how is he going to keep campaigning after that?