Newt took most Santorum votes in South Carolina anyway, and he won.
And in Florida, Santorum didn’t break 20%, and if you gave Newt every vote Santorum got, Romney still would have won.
So I’m not sure how running an ad with Santorum praising Gingrich would have done much of anything. It’s not like at the time Santorum was a major player. Who really cared in Florida what Santorum thought of Gingrich.
I mean, the one argument that has some degree of accuracy is that Santorum, even with his win in Iowa, was an also-ran candidate, until Newt crashed and burned. Then Santorum was “last man standing”. But that being true, Gingrich had to fight Romney in Florida, not try to gain by using the back-bencher Santorum to try to build himself up. There just wasn’t value in that.
If we are armchair quarterbacking, I think Newt would have done much better if his response to his loss in Iowa hadn’t been to claim he was switching to an all-out negative assault on Romney, and was “sacrificing” himself to take out Romney.
Newt’s biggest positive was that he had managed to STAY positive, to attack only the right people, and to cast himself as the republican uniter.
But when he declared war on Romney, I think it hurt him. Romney’s ads clearly stung as well, but I don’t think they would have gotten as much traction if Gingrich was still “above the fray”. Since Gingrich had declared war, I think the average voter figured “all’s fair in war”.
Of course, that is just my uninformed opinion. I’m not connected enough to suggest to people what to do, much less to think they might listen to my suggestions. ON the positive side, that means I don’t feel regret like you do.
I should think that Perry endorsing Newt would have gotten most Perry supporters on his side, and Palin’s “vote for Newt” messages in SC and Florida should have gotten most of the diehard Palin folks. And it seems clear most Cain folks were on board with Newt from the day Cain left.
I don’t think there were enough Bachmann supporters left to matter.
I agree with most of your assessments, but I do not see this - and never have seen this - as a pure N + R = defeat of Mitt concept. I think a lot of Newt voters would support Mitt and I think a fair number of Santorum voters would also - if either were to go away. Not on FR or on talk radio maybe, but in the general public.
What we do know is this, there is only one state where the campaign was run in a manner that will defeat Obama: and that was SC. In every other state, Mitt has drummed down turn out with his negative assault machine.
That ain’t getting it done in November.