Romney wins big in Florida

TAMPA, Fla. — Mitt Romney claimed a powerful victory in Florida’s presidential primary, reasserting himself as the front-runner for his party’s nomination and leaving Newt Gingrich reeling from a likely double-digit defeat and facing an uncertain path to regaining his post-South Carolina momentum.

With 96 percent of precincts reporting, Romney led Gingrich by 16 percentage points, 47 percent to 32 percent. Rick Santorum was a distant third, with 13 percent, followed by Ron Paul with 7 percent.


In just 10 days, Romney went from limping out of South Carolina — where Gingrich beat him handily — to scoring an almost across-the-board win against the former House speaker with nearly every category of GOP primary voter.

Addressing an energetic crowd of supporters here in Tampa, Romney acknowledged that the primary campaign was not over but predicted the GOP was on its way to victory in the fall.

“A competitive primary does not divide us. It prepares us. And we will win,” Romney said. “When we gather back here in Tampa seven months from now for our convention, ours will be a united party with a winning ticket for America.”

Said Romney: “I stand ready to lead this party and to lead our nation.”

Romney’s final victory margin may tighten as returns come in from Florida’s conservative western Panhandle. But with a majority of votes reported, Romney appeared on the brink of an important symbolic accomplishment: winning more votes than Gingrich and Santorum — the two would-be anti-Romney conservatives — combined.

That won’t put to rest questions about Romney’s ability to connect with and fire up the activist base of the Republican Party. It may, however, deprive his beleaguered opponents of a key argument they’ve used to explain their persistence in the race.

Romney won with both men and women and in every age and income group, according to network exit polls. He won a majority of white voters — 53 percent — and 44 percent of Latinos.

The only conspicuous bright spot for Gingrich was voters who described themselves as “very conservative,” who made up 33 percent of the electorate and broke for Gingrich over Romney, 43 percent to 29 percent.

In his own evening speech in Orlando, Gingrich insisted that Florida had only helped to reinforce the overarching narrative of the campaign.

“It is now clear that this will be a two-person race between the conservative leader, Newt Gingrich, and the Massachusetts moderate,” Gingrich said. “The voters of Florida really made that clear.”

With supporters waving signs that read, “46 States to Go,” Gingrich vowed: “We are going to contest every place and we are going to win and we will be in Tampa as the nominee in August.”

Gingrich will be hard-pressed to keep up with Romney, financially and organizationally — a dynamic already in play in Florida.

The dramatic scale of Romney’s win is in some respects a tale of traditional campaign legwork and preparation paying off. The Bay Stater raised money faster and earlier, built an operation in Florida sooner, and worked aggressively to exploit the state’s early and absentee voting laws.

And for the second time in the campaign — after the pro-Romney super PAC blitzed Gingrich with negative ads in Iowa — Romney’s overwhelming financial advantage came into play.

Between his campaign and the pro-Romney super PAC Restore Our Future, Romney outspent Gingrich on the Florida airwaves by some $12 million, according to sources tracking the air war here.

Romney was unapologetic about blasting away at Gingrich with saturation-level attack ads, casting himself as the victim of Gingrich’s negative politics — though it was in fact Romney’s super PAC that fired the first paid-media shots of the campaign.

“I’ll tell you, if you attack me, I’m not going to just sit back, I’m going to fight back and I’m going to fight back hard,” Romney said.

Gingrich sounded an equally defiant note in an interview with ABC News early Tuesday, saying he expected the primary fight to continue for the better part of a year — “six or eight months,” he said, “unless Romney drops out earlier.”

Exit polls reflected the searingly negative tone of the Florida contest, with voters split almost evenly in their assessment of who ran the most unfair campaign. Thirty-seven percent said it was Romney, according to CBS News, and 34 percent named Gingrich.

Romney has also benefited from having organized earlier and more aggressively in the state, where he has sought to maximize his supporters’ participation in absentee and early-voting programs.

In a sign of the thinning GOP field, only Romney and Gingrich remained in the Sunshine State on primary night.

The two other candidates who remain in the race, Paul and Santorum, have already moved on to Colorado and Nevada, where they campaigned Tuesday ahead of the state’s non-binding February caucuses.

Like Gingrich, both Santorum and Paul have vowed to stay in the race for months to come. In an interview with CNN, Santorum argued that the Florida results showed that it was time to give another conservative candidate a shot at the big-time because Gingrich “had his shot” and “couldn’t deliver.”

The race in Florida serves as a reminder, however, of the long odds that face any insurgent candidate as the political battlefield expands to a more national scale.

The next nomination contest with delegates at stake is Saturday’s caucus in Nevada, where Romney is also favored.

Romney supporters have generally shied away from suggesting that other presidential candidates accept the inevitable and pull out of the race. But Florida Sen. Marco Rubio, who has not endorsed in the race, made an argument Tuesday that the Romney camp may stoke in the coming weeks.

“The winner of Florida is in all likelihood going to be the nominee of our party,” he told CNN.

“I am impatient because I want us to get to the case for replacing Barack Obama and obviously, I’d like to see us unify behind a candidate as soon as possible,” Rubio elaborated later on Fox News. “I do think the sooner the better, but not in an artificial way.”