Can Gingrich's already troubled presidential campaign continue? | REUTERS Gingrich advisers resign en masse

Newt Gingrich’s top staff quit en masse Thursday, throwing into question whether his already troubled presidential campaign can continue.

Two sources close to the situation confirmed that campaign manager Rob Johnson, strategists Sam Dawson and Dave Carney, spokesman Rick Tyler and consultants Katon Dawson in South Carolina and Craig Schoenfeld in Iowa quit to protest what one called a “different vision” for the campaign.


In a statement on Facebook following the stunning news, Gingrich said he will stay in the race.

“I am committed to running the substantive, solutions-oriented campaign I set out to run earlier this spring,” he wrote.

But with his entire high command having left at once, that task will be considerably more difficult.

The mass resignation was, one source said, “a team decision.”

“The professional team came to the realization that the direction of the campaign they sought and Newt’s vision for the campaign were incompatible,” said Carney.

Gingrich is intent on using technology and standing out at debates to get traction while his advisers believe he needs to run a campaign that incorporates traditional, grass-roots techniques as well as new ideas.

“To be successful in Iowa, you need to be here, [and] taking a look at the way the schedule was, he’s not scheduled to be here in June at all, and he’s got very few appearances in July,” said Schoenfeld. “You want to make sure that you give yourself a chance to be successful.”

Another source added: “We felt like he’d be better off if he had the opportunity to proceed with his vision and how he wants to do things.”

One official said the last straw came when Gingrich went ahead last week with a long-planned cruise in the Greek isles with his wife.

After his bumpy start, rumors began to circulate in the political community the former House speaker’s days as a candidate were numbered. But the collective decision by his high command to quit makes it likely that his demise will be hastened.

Officials like Dawson and Tyler have advised for Gingrich for years. And Johnson, who ran Texas Gov. Rick Perry’s campaign last year, was seen as bringing a measure of stability to the organization.

Speculation immediately started to build as to whether Johnson and Carney, Perry’s chief political adviser, will start planning a presidential campaign for the Texan.

“It means they’ll be thinking even harder down in Austin,” longtime GOP strategist Tucker Eskew said of the news.

But Carney insisted his decision was unrelated to Perry.

“It has no impact, nor will it [on Perry],” he said.

Gingrich stumbled almost immediately out of the gate, declaring in May on NBC’s “Meet the Press” that the House Republican budget plan was too “radical” and represented “right-wing social engineering.”

As his campaign struggled to clean up that mistake — Gingrich took days to apologize to Wisconsin Rep. Paul Ryan, the budget’s author — the former House speaker was hit by the embarrassing revelation that he and his wife had once racked up hundreds of thousands of dollars in debt at the luxury jeweler Tiffany & Co.

Gingrich and his top aides insisted at the time that the botched rollout had not affected the candidate’s standing with voters, blaming instead the Washington “literati” for their predicament.

In late May, he dismissed the idea that his campaign had been struggling since fumbling an answer about his support for Ryan’s plan.

“The reports of my campaign’s death were greatly exaggerated,” Gingrich said.

But then, he virtually vanished from the scene, taking more than a week off from the campaign trail.

He was spotted over Memorial Day weekend strolling by himself and reading a Kindle in Old Town Alexandria. Then he left for the ill-timed vacation. His aides refused to say where he was, and his whereabouts were unknown until this week, when POLITICO revealed that Gingrich and his wife, Callista, were on a cruise in the Mediterranean.

Sources connected to Gingrich’s departed team said many of those who left pinned some of the blame for the candidate’s missteps on his wife.

“He does whatever she wants,” one source said, adding that the Greek cruise was long-scheduled and Gingrich didn’t feel he could put up an argument against it.

Another source gave the same account.

Morale on the campaign had plunged in recent weeks, with officials privately expressing uncertainty about how long the former speaker could survive in the race.

The internal divisions began to spill into public view last week. As POLITICO first reported, a longtime Gingrich loyalist in Iowa, Will Rogers, abruptly left the campaign. Soon after, Rogers publicly expressed concern about the lack of personal time Gingrich had invested in Iowa.

And word that Carney and Johnson would be leaving Gingrich’s campaign — and signing on with Perry — first surfaced this week even as sources familiar with their thinking denied any such plan.

Campaign aides met with Gingrich in the past few days to reconcile their differing visions, said a source close to the situation, but after a final meeting Thursday, it became clear they couldn’t reach any resolution

The staff’s final decision to quit was agreed upon, and group members collectively told Gingrich of their intentions at his Arlington, Va., campaign office.

Alexander Burns contributed to this report.