Posted by
Steve on Thursday, January 19, 2012 11:20:58 AM
According to news reports, Rick Perry is set to announce that he is suspending (ending) his campaign. The reports also say that Perry will endorse Newt Gingrich. That would be obvious to anyone who was listening to the ads that have been running the past few weeks. Perry and Gingrich have ads that are essentially interchangeable. According to Barry Young on the Nearly Famous Barry Young Show on KFYI, this is a poke in the eye with a sharp stick to Romney.
That Rick Perry is ending his campaign is no surprise. He has been polling in the single digits since Iowa. The polls have not been trending up at all. His endorsement of Gingrich will help Gingrich, but not by much.
That leaves four candidates for President on the Republican side. They are: Mitt Romney, Newt Gingrich, Rick Santorum and Ron Paul. Realistically only Mitt Romney and Rick Santorum have a realistic shot at winning the nomination. If Romney wins in South Carolina and Florida, the funding will dry up for everyone except for Ron Paul. That would effectively end all the campaigns except for Romney.
Other news this morning is that the Iowa Caucus has been reviewed by the state GOP. After their review, Rick Santorum is leading by 34 votes. That does not mean much because the results of 8 precincts have been lost. The Iowa GOP declared that the Iowa Caucus was a tie between Romney and Santorum. Either candidate can claim that the missing 8 polling places would have resulted in their achieving a victory. Nobody will ever know the entire story.
In South Carolina, Mitt Romney has been leading in the polls. At one point Romney was said to have a lead of up to 21 points. That is back down to the 5-10% range that has been typical during most of the polling. In 2008, Mitt Romney came in 4th. Also Newt Gingrich is from the general area. Any victory, no matter how small, will be game changing for Romney. It would springboard him into a gigantic lead in Florida and the nomination. A narrow loss would not hurt Romney much as South Carolina is considered a difficult state for him to win. Gingrich has to win South Carolina convincingly in order to have any chance at winning the nomination. A narrow victory by Newt is better than a loss, but not by much. Newt is essentially on home field. He has to win in order to maintain credibility.
Florida has many voters that moved to Florida from the Northeast. They would be natural Romney supporters. This is showing up in the polls in Florida. The last poll I heard about had Romney up by 12%. That is a poll from about a week ago, so the information probably changed. Winning South Carolina would cause those numbers to jump even further. The decisiveness of a 15-20% victory in Florida would effectively end the candidacy of all the rest of the challengers, except for Ron Paul.
Ron Paul is not really running for President. I believe that he is running to get his message out to the public. The longer he is in the race, the more his message gets out. Ron Paul wants to have some clout at the convention so that he can have some impact on the party platform. I believe that winning the Presidency is not why Ron Paul is running. If he were to win the Presidency, he would love it. But that is not why he is running for President.
For all the candidates except for Mitt Romney, things look bleak. They are looking at defeats in South Carolina and Florida. The desperation is showing in their ads. Gingrich is throwing away his conservative credentials to try and pull out a win. Rick Santorum is running smarter ads, but does not have the campaign cash to set up the campaign infrastructure needed to actually win the nomination. Romney already has the campaign infrastructure set up in all 50 states. Nobody else has much except for South Carolina and maybe Florida.