After a January that included half a dozen televised debates, massive swings in the polls, four contests that yielded three different winners, and a staggering display of fundraising and spending on negative TV advertising, February was going to be the month that Mitt Romney tightened his grip on the GOP nomination.
But the Republican leadership contest is as fluid and unpredictable as ever with Rick Santorum’s Midwest sweep of three states, delivering a dramatic twist to the race.
Every campaign is now recalibrating for the months ahead. Here is your guide to each campaign’s strategy to win momentum and defend against any missteps and attacks.
Rick Santorum
The former Pennsylvania senator is suddenly the momentum candidate. Up until his Midwest victories in Missouri, Minnesota and Colorado, he had one victory: a narrow win in the Iowa caucuses.
He has followed a shrewd strategy of focusing on states where he can run a campaign that is less costly and with constituencies that will find his social and fiscal conservatism appealing.
“I don’t stand here to be the conservative alternative to Mitt Romney, I stand here to be the conservative alternative to Barack Obama,” Mr. Santorum told supporters in Missouri during his victory speech, a comment meant to dismiss Newt Gingrich and Mr. Romney at the same time.
Mr. Santorum will have a two-pronged strategy: hitting Mr. Gingrich as a Republican politician with a track record of alienating colleagues and being unpredictable, while hitting Mr. Romney for being too similar to President Barack Obama – likening the president’s health-care reform to Mr. Romney’s health-care reform as governor of Massachusetts.
Mr. Santorum’s hope is that Mr. Gingrich will stumble badly, and the very conservative grassroots of the party will come to him instead.
But Mr. Santorum is vulnerable, just as Mr. Gingrich is vulnerable, on his Washington D.C. political career. And the vast campaign war chest that Mr. Romney possesses has already hit Mr. Santorum over his time in Congress and partaking in “pork barrel” politics, otherwise known as the common practice of steering money to one’s home state.
Mr. Santorum also shares another problem with Mr. Gingrich: they both need money – and lots of it – to come anywhere near the Romney campaign’s political machine and its use of Super PACs to wage a withering campaign of TV attack ads.
Mitt Romney
With strong double-digit wins in Florida and Nevada, the former Massachusetts governor had regained the air of ‘inevitability.’ It lasted only a handful of days. Gone suddenly are the commentators, often conservatives, frequently discussing Mr. Romney’s eventual vice-presidential running-mate: Hispanic-American political super-star Senator Marco Rubio or New Jersey Governor Chris Christie?
The Romney campaign is once again vulnerable and with the key contests of Arizona and Michigan at the end of February, it must campaign with all kinds of questions over Mr. Romney’s vulnerability.
But Mr. Romney has been here before: in December his supporters unleashed attacks ads that cut down Mr. Gingrich’s remarkable surge, and when Mr. Gingrich won the South Carolina primary in January he took the attacks directly to Mr. Gingrich and won the Florida primary.
Now, it is Mr. Santorum’s turn in the attack ad spotlight. The Romney campaign will paint Mr. Santorum as a Washington D.C. insider. It is already buying ad time in states like Ohio, which is holding its primary in March.
Mr. Romney has been able to defend his candidacy after coming under attack over not releasing his tax records (which he did eventually) and his tenure as head of investment firm Bain Capital. But there are other key areas that are more difficult to explain away: the turnout in GOP contests is lower than 2008 and has led some – often Democrats – to talk about an enthusiasm gap; as the Republican race becomes nastier and Mr. Romney attacks his opponents more directly, his popularity is dipping; and polls show that President Obama would beat him in a general election.
