Posted on 03/09/2012 11:35:16 AM PST by Steelfish
Gingrich Not In Kansas Anymore: Will Focus On Alabama and Mississippi Primaries By Rachel Rose Hartman
Reinvigorated by a home state win in Georgia Tuesday, former House Speaker Newt Gingrich is setting himself up for two more must-wins next Tuesday in Alabama and Missississippi as he seeks to lay claim to the south.
"This race has been a roller coaster up and down," Gingrich told a Jackson, Miss. audience Friday morning, drawing a roller coaster's trajectory with his finger-- completing a metaphor he's adopted on the stump. "I believe with your help next Tuesday when we win here and we win in Alabama we'll be back up again."
In a signal of how much stock the campaign is placing in Mississippi and Alabama, Gingrich cancelled a day-long campaign swing through Kansas--which votes in caucuses this Saturday--to instead campaign in the two states.
Gingrich is running at a financial disadvantage to Romney and has therefore been carefully picking his targets, risking a loss of momentum by sitting out difficult races such as primaries Feb. 28 in Michigan and Arizona.
Gingrich's campaign continues to contend that Romney isn't a "convincing" or able frontrunner. In an interview with Yahoo News on Super Tuesday, Gingrich spokesman R.C. Hammond said Romney continues to fail to excite the base. "He's not offering solutions," Hammond said. He also argued that Gingrich continues to show grassroots donor strength, which will translate into votes in upcoming states, unlike Romney, who he said was funded by wealthy corporate donors and others who have "maxed out" their support.
But Gingrich's chief opponent in Tuesday's contests is not Romney, who has not been very successful at wooing conservatives and is not expected to fare well in Mississippi and Alabama. It's Rick Santorum Gingrich must contend with if we wants to add...
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The winner.
Go Newt!
Gobble up those unpledged delegates before Romney does!
If Gingrich takes the South and Texas, I don’t think there will be a winner. It will be a contested convention.
You are correct that the national media will talk about KS all weekend. It is also correct that Newt will blanket local media in AL and MS and explain why he is doing as he is doing. He cares about the South and shares a cultural closeness with Southern Americans that gives him a likeability factor there that Romney and Santorum simply don’t share.
This angle of being a ‘regional’ candidate is only as strong as the individual candidate’s ability to make a case across all the regions. Romney won Michigan, Massachusetts, Vermont, all states we could lose in the general and still win the presidency. No way we win if we can’t take Georgia, Mississippi, Alabama. Romney took Florida only because of a coordinated media attack on Newt together with the establishment GOP last month on ‘Black Thursday’. Romney’s strength in the primarys is contrived. Santorum cannot defeat Newt head-on in those states.
The AL and MS results are crucial and in a tough situation, worth going after, even at the near-term expense of Kansas.
Why, they are not winner take all states??? Current count here: http://www.cbsnews.com/8301-503544_162-57394486-503544/long-tough-delegate-battle-lies-ahead-for-gop-candidates/
I hope it works, but Santorum has created a bigtime campaign out of the tiniest and most insignificant (numerically speaking) wins. He wins the tiny Saturday thing and for some reason it impacts the big Tuesday things. Amazing how folks in this country do not have any grasp of demographic reality.
None. But I hope it does work.
Perhaps. However, it has been my observation in following politics for almost 50 years that withdrawing resources is almost always a sign of concesssion. If MS and AL were the prize along, why did Newt put resources in KS to begin with?
Sorry, I meant “ALL along”
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