MYRTLE BEACH, S.C. — Fresh off a stunning upset victory in South Carolina, Newt Gingrich on Sunday took the brawl for the Republican presidential nomination to Florida, where his underfunded but emotionally charged campaign will collide head-on with the organizational might of the man he beat, Mitt Romney.
Each of the first three nominating contests produced a different winner, leaving it to Florida to either further muddle the nominating picture or finally set one of the three contenders — Romney, Gingrich and former U.S. Sen. Rick Santorum — on track to become the party’s nominee.
The candidates didn’t wait to get to Florida to begin sniping at each other. Gingrich on Sunday boasted of leading an insurgent campaign against a Republican establishment.
“The establishment is right to be worried about a Gingrich nomination,” he said on NBC’s “Meet the Press” on Sunday. “We are going to make the establishment very uncomfortable. We are going to demand real change in Washington.”
Romney painted Gingrich as a political insider “who spent 40 years in Washington as a congressman and a lobbyist.” Appearing on “Fox News Sunday,” Romney questioned Gingrich’s “sobriety” and “steadiness.”
“He’s not as reliable a conservative leader as some people might imagine,” Romney said.
Though Romney is coming off an admittedly “bad week,” he has a decided advantage in the winner-takes-all Sunshine State, which remains critical to the nominating process even though the national party cut its convention delegation in half, to 50. Florida is being penalized for moving its primary up to Jan. 31, which forced several other states to scramble their primary dates to go first.
Tens of thousands of early votes have already poured into Florida, and those are thought to benefit Romney. Meanwhile, Romney and the super-PAC that’s supporting him have already spent more money in Florida — with more than a week of spending to go before the Jan. 31 vote — than they did in the entire South Carolina campaign.
Analysts were quick to note that Florida is geographically close but politically worlds apart from South Carolina.
“The religious makeup, age, race and ideology — it’s quite different,” said Susan MacManus, a political scientist at the University of South Florida, where the candidates will debate Monday night.
Florida voters are older and more diverse than South Carolina’s. The state also has far more Catholics and Jewish voters, a very different electorate from the heavily evangelical body of voters that boosted Gingrich to victory in Saturday’s primary. However, the candidates will debate twice this week, which favors Gingrich. His bold performances in a pair of debates before the South Carolina vote helped him win.
“A lot of people came up to me after church on Sunday and said, ‘Gingrich, are you serious?’ ” MacManus said. “They have serious concerns. It’s like we’ve just finished the regular season; now we go to playoffs, and this is the first game that really counts.”
Romney is hoping to break free of one self-inflicted controversy. He said Sunday that he would release his tax returns online. Revelations that Romney had paid 15 percent in taxes, a lower rate than the average taxpayer pays, and his refusal to release his returns were hurting him with voters looking for a leader who can relate to their economic anxieties.
