The battle for Florida
Posted: Thursday, January 24, 2008 10:00 AM by Domenico Montanaro
Filed Under:
Republicans
A new Miami Herald poll shows that “McCain is narrowly leading the Republican field [in Florida] with 25 percent of the vote, followed by Romney with 23 percent… Giuliani and Huckabee each got 15 percent.” More: With his poll numbers slipping back home in the Northeast as well, Giuliani's campaign is likely to collapse if he can't turn it around in the five days left before Florida's Jan. 29 vote, the final gateway before a blitz of primaries around the nation that could sew up the race. 'He may be running for president, but with these numbers he wouldn't be elected governor of Florida,' said Republican pollster Kellyanne Conway, whose firm conducted the survey with Democratic pollsters Schroth, Eldon & Associates. Alluding to the timeworn song, Conway added: `If he can't make it there in Florida, he can't make it anywhere.'”
The Washington Post frames the race in Florida as a two-person contest between McCain and Romney. Deju vu all over again? Nine months ago, wasn't this a Romney-McCain fight? And lo and behold, after more twists and turns than any GOP nomination fight in history, we're back to the future. Our head is spinning.
How much of Giuliani's problems in this primary have to do with the fact that a lot of New York transplants in Florida are registered Dems and can't vote in the GOP primary? The Washington Post: "Not all of the New York transplants who have come out to see Giuliani in Florida are Republicans. His supporters here include Democrats, who helped propel him to large margins of victory in his mayoral races but who are ineligible to cast a ballot in Florida's primary, which is restricted to registered Republicans."
How Florida-centric is Rudy's campaign now? He's got an ad featuring a hurricane.
The Tampa Tribune: ”Mitt Romney returned to Tampa on Wednesday, stressing his business resume to gain the upper hand on Sen. John McCain and other GOP presidential foes as the slumping economy may be fast surpassing national security as the top issue… "You have that executive leadership where you learn how to pull together a team of people to listen to different ideas, to establish a course of action, to hire the people to carry out that course of action, to get budgets for it. And there are others whose experience has been very different,’ Romney said.”
He's not pulling out. He's pushing in. And digging in to his main rivals while he's at it. At a rally in Ft. Lauderdale last night, NBC/NJ’s Carrie Dann reports, Huckabee dismissed "crazy rumors" that he's scaling back his efforts in Florida, where he's in hot competition to pull conservative votes off of rivals John McCain and Mitt Romney. Speaking to reporters afterward, the former Arkansas governor had some unflattering things to say about Romney's financial background.
"If one looks at his business career, it was largely dealing with a capital company that took companies off and broke them apart," said Huckabee of Romney, formerly the CEO of Boston-based consulting firm Bain and Co. "A lot of the money that was made within those companies ended up offshore. I'm not sure that that helps the American economy when you take people's money and you put it in the Cayman Island bank accounts."
