Florida Primary On Horizon

Newt Gingrich is riding a huge wave into Florida after his trouncing of Romney in South Carolina. Romney has been left reeling after a double digit lead a week ago slid into a larger double digit loss to Gingrich.  Even more telling of the challenge that Romney is facing is the fact that Santorum took a fairly strong third place indicating that people are seeking the conservative alternative to the RINO progressive.  And with the Florida Primary less than two weeks away, there is much ground for Romney to make up in a very difficult state.

Despite the fact that Florida has been stripped of half of its delegates as punishment for moving its primary to this earlier time slot, the primary is still a winner-take-all scenario.  That means that coming in as anything other than first is no good.  All the delegates are awarded to the winner.  Seems to me that stripping Florida of delegates is more of a punishment on the candidates, but who would ever claim that the GOP has brains?  The Republicans are actually just punishing the Party, not Florida.

Florida is a difficult state to read.  Florida is neither red nor blue, but more a nice shade of periwinkle! (Ha!)  A bulk of the voters in the Sunshine State are snowbirds that fly the coop from New England.  Florida is also a very large state and hard to cover in a short period of time.  Money becomes an issue both with traversing the state and with advertising.  Florida has ten independent television markets.  That makes buying ads very expensive because the candidates want to reach everybody.  And Romney already has a huge jump on the others.  I’ve been watching Romney ads for four weeks now during almost every other commercial break.  Rather nauseating I will admit.  Romney’s SuperPac, Restore Our Future, has purchased $3 million worth of TV time during that period.  Radio ads have slanted more for Gingrich because they are more affordable and one of his SuperPacs, Winning The Future, is footing the bill.  One of the main corridors in Florida is Interstate 4 that runs west and east across a bulk of the Central Florida area where I live.  Demographics reveal that 45% of Florida’s Republicans live in this corridor, so most of the ads are being focused here.

Ron Paul is making the big mistake of basically ignoring Florida, making this a three man race.  Florida is a must win state!  Monday night Tampa will host a debate, which Romney just recently agreed to attend.  The debates have become increasing more important as demonstrated with Gingrich’s surge after two fabulous debate appearances that became Romney’s two worst debate appearances.  Romney needs to polish up his answers and follow through with releasing his tax returns as he promised today.  But even that may not be enough to overcome a strong Gingrich whom also announced that he would consider Col. Allen West as VP.  And for the first time, Col. West insinuated he would be interested in the job.  As Newt Gingrich put it today on Face The Nation when speaking of Romney, “You end up with a guy who is a very good salesman, who very much wants to sell, but has a very weak product.  I think he’s been dancing on eggs, trying … to find a version of Romney that would work.”  As far as I see it, no version of Romney will work and the GOP will lose with him on the top of the ticket.  The Establishment needs to listen up to what the base has told them in South Carolina, “Don’t shove your crappy candidates down our throats!”