ORLANDO, Fla. — No matter the outcome of Florida’s primary election Tuesday, Republican presidential contender Newt Gingrich vowed to fight on to the party’s convention in August, raising concerns among party leaders that a drawn-out primary fight will leave Republicans bitterly divided heading into the general election fight against President Obama.
“On big philosophical issues, [Mitt Romney] is for all practical purposes a liberal and I am a conservative and that’s what this fight is going to be about all the way to the convention,” Gingrich said Monday, despite polls showing him trailing Romney on the eve of the Florida vote.
Gingrich, who is trailing Romney in Florida just a week after the former speaker beat him in South Carolina, is already looking past Florida as his campaign enters what a top aide called “a new phase.”
The former House speaker will focus on consolidating the anti-Romney vote — Republicans reluctant to back Romney but divided between several conservative rivals, including Gingrich — while securing as many convention delegates as possible in upcoming nominating contests. Primary rules require many states to share their delegates proportionately among all candidates based on votes cast, making it easier for a candidate like Gingrich to secure delegates even if he loses the state primaries.
“There is a long way to go before either candidate clinches the nomination and this campaign will continue for months,” Gingrich’s national political director, Martin Baker, told reporters. “The bottom line: Regardless of the message the Romney campaign wants to push and the media wants to deliver, this race is just getting started.”
That kind of combative message has long been associated with Gingrich, who began his political career as a back-bench Republican congressman from Georgia waging a lonely rhetorical battle against Democrats who had controlled Congress for 40 years. His pugilist approach to politics helped Gingrich lead the Republican takeover of the House in 1994 and elevated him to House speaker, but it also undermined his standing among fellow Republicans who ultimately helped force him from office.
Some GOP leaders now cringe at the possibility of a drawn-out primary or a brokered convention like the one Gingrich envisions.
“It only helps President Obama,” former Republican Sen. Mel Martinez of Florida told MSNBC Monday.
Before a Gingrich event in Stuart, Fla., Martin County Republican Chairwoman Susan Auld quoted Abraham Lincoln to warn of the risks of a protracted nomination fight.
“A house divided against itself will not stand,” Auld told the gathered crowd. “And I will add that a party divided against itself will not win.”
If Romney wins Florida and does well in the February nominating contests, “at some point Gingrich just looks like an angry, frustrated spoilsport,” said Stephen Hess, a former adviser to presidents Ford and Carter. Hess said Gingrich will have to quit the race before too long “if he has any future in partisan politics.”
“He’s a man who wants a voice in public policy and to make a good living — you don’t do that by building a stone wall around yourself,” he said. “At some point, assuming he is losing, he has to join the mainstream wherever it is going.”
