Picking up Georgia could lead to a win in Tennessee, the Gingrich camp says. Newt looks South for comeback

ATLANTA — Since his loss in Florida, Newt Gingrich has all but disappeared.

In Nevada, he essentially flouted public events. He then ignored the next contests in Colorado, Minnesota and Missouri, instead making a few Ohio appearances. While Mitt Romney and Rick Santorum duked it out in Michigan and Ohio this week — important Super Tuesday states — Gingrich could instead be found in California, where he spent the majority of his time raising funds.


The former House speaker finally emerged in a significant primary state this weekend in Georgia, his home turf after serving two decades as a suburban Atlanta congressman. He is counting on the Peach State — with its 76 delegates, the most of any state on Super Tuesday — to help him mount yet a third comeback in what has been a roller-coaster race. But the former speaker’s puzzling campaign itinerary and take-it-or-leave-it approach to the campaign calendar may stand in the way.

Gingrich says he is still playing to win. The sparks of another rise will begin in Georgia, he insists, and grow in other Southern states like Tennessee that are rich with delegates. But pinning all of his hopes on winning one geographic region holds serious risks.

“If you win Georgia and Tennessee, that’s not enough and I’m not so sure that Newt is going to win Tennessee,” said Chip Saltsman, former campaign manager for Mike Huckabee. “You’ve got to win multiple states in multiple regions to say you’ve got momentum to be the nominee.”

The ex-lawmaker is campaigning with former presidential candidates from the South who have now endorsed him: Atlanta businessman Herman Cain, who stumped with him this weekend, and former Tennessee Sen. Fred Thompson. Texas Gov. Rick Perry will also be joining him on the campaign trail.

“We actually have a very good chance of doing well here and that gives us a springboard then to go across the whole country,” Gingrich told reporters Saturday at a press conference in Suwanee, Ga. “I think that’s part of what we are counting on.”

“I think a Georgia conservative has a certain advantage across Tennessee, Kentucky, Alabama, you know, Arkansas, Mississippi, Louisiana — just take the region,” he said.

But Georgia, Tennessee and Virginia are the only Southern states that vote on Super Tuesday (March 6), and Gingrich isn’t even on the ballot in Virginia. And there are three important contests before then in Arizona, Michigan and Washington state in which the ex-speaker has not thus far played aggressively.

While Mississippi, Alabama and Louisiana vote in March, Kentucky and Arkansas don’t hold their contests until late May. By that point, it may be too late to permanently capture the momentum in the Republican race.

Gingrich is planning trips outside the South, but it’s unclear how hard he’ll play there. This week, he stumps in Oklahoma — which also votes on Super Tuesday — and Arizona, where he will participate in the GOP debate on Wednesday. He will also campaign in Michigan and Washington state, which hold their contests on Feb. 28 and March 3, respectively.

The former speaker intends to take advantage of party rules that allow contenders to collect delegates even if they don’t place first in a contest.

“In Michigan, if you get above 15 percent you end up getting delegates,” Gingrich said at a press conference in Los Angeles on Thursday. “So I have a very real interest in seeing if we can be competitive in Michigan. The last survey I saw showed us beginning to be competitive there again.”

But banking almost entirely on the South to sew up the nomination is a risky strategy for a variety of reasons. Ignoring other major contests has the downside of allowing other contenders to build momentum and permitting the media to buzz about a candidate’s absence from the main campaign battleground, in much the same fashion as it did this week.

The gambit also opens Gingrich up to questions about whether he can win in areas of the country outside of his geographic stronghold in a general election.

“After the ups and downs of this cycle, I hesitate to make any predictions, but I don’t see how Gingrich’s strategy works,” said Christian Ferry, a senior adviser to John McCain in 2008. “He is reliant on debates for attention and Romney is wisely not playing into that strategy.”

Party rules that have caused the contest to go on longer by distributing delegates proportionally in early states are a double-edged sword for Gingrich. While those rules have kept Romney from running away with the primary, they also minimize the potential benefits Gingrich could accrue by winning the Southern states on Super Tuesday.

“Making it worse for him, those states are proportional, so he won’t win all the delegates,” Ferry said. “Finally, last I checked Tennessee and Virginia are Southern states and Gingrich isn’t on the ballot in one and didn’t file a full delegate slate in the other. I call that a major fail.”

Gingrich’s campaign only submitted a partial list of delegates in Tennessee, but at the time his staff argued it would be virtually impossible for him to win 100 percent of the vote there, so a full slate wasn’t needed.

Gingrich has his sights set specifically on Texas, where Perry has endorsed him. The Lone Star State boasts a 155-delegate prize, the second-largest of any state behind California, which holds its primary in June.

After weeks of citing Texas as a state he believes he’ll fare well in, especially considering Perry’s continued popularity, Gingrich has backed away from that claim. A dispute over the state’s congressional district map has delayed the presidential primary to late May at the earliest.

Nonetheless, Gingrich argues that his track record in Southern states shows that he is poised to win in the region.

"Remember, the large sections of Ohio and large sections of Illinois ... are much more Southern than people think and so I think there's a lot of common conservatism there that you reach a lot of places with," he said.

After losses in Iowa and New Hampshire, Gingrich won South Carolina. And he did well in Florida’s Panhandle, besting Romney in the counties that are more Southern in culture than the rest of the state.

Gingrich is also tweaking his message to conform to his strategy. At campaign stops in Georgia this weekend, his speech was heavier on social issues like religion and gun rights, themes he acknowledged play well in the South.

“I’ve been talking about that pretty directly for weeks now,” Gingrich said of his long stump speech riff on religious freedoms. “As you can tell from the audience here, I do think there is a deep feeling.”

And Gingrich noticed the cheers and standing ovations from the crowd when he bemoaned the inability to fit a gun rack into hybrid cars like the Volt or Prius.

“I do think the message that you’ve seen today, and those of you who were there last night, and it works and you saw it work and people respond to it,” Gingrich said. “I think it fits their values, it fits their life as you’ve seen here and makes it fairly easy for us.”

After attending a Gingrich rally in Atlanta on Saturday, Dave Millard said it’s the former speaker’s policy positions that appeal to him.

“He’s a man of the South,” Millard said. “Southern values are different than Northern values.”