Rolling the dice with Newt

Gingrich's fiery style excites the base. But it also turns off a majority of Americans

A funny thing happened on the way to the coronation. Mitt Romney looked ready to roll to three successive primary-cycle victories to start 2012 in style. He won an eight-vote Iowa caucus victory, blew the competition away as expected in New Hampshire, and started off in South Carolina with a polling edge over Rick Santorum, who finished an ultra-close second in Iowa. When Jon Huntsman withdrew and immediately endorsed Romney, it seemed as though the upcoming South Carolina and Florida primaries would all but end the GOP nomination fight and let the party unify behind a single candidate.

Suddenly, though, Newt Gingrich caught fire. Rick Perry's withdrawal and immediate endorsement of Gingrich got sandwiched between two dynamic debate performances in which Gingrich attacked the media to great effect. Romney stumbled in the first South Carolina debate on the issue of releasing his tax returns, and then proved he didn't learn from the experience by repeating the same fumble in the second. Gingrich roared back from a double-digit polling deficit to win the state by double digits, dominating in every congressional district, and thus taking almost all of the delegates, despite the proportional disbursement used by the state.

With Newt's ferocity comes a number of complications.

Until Gingrich won South Carolina in a landslide, Romney's path to the nomination appeared clear and uncomplicated. Florida's closed Republican primary would marginalize Ron Paul and make it difficult for a conservative to consolidate opposition to his nomination. A big delegate haul would send Romney off into a series of simultaneously-contested states where his big organizational edge would seal the nomination. 

Now, however, Romney may not win Florida at all, let alone by a convincing margin. Polling by both Rasmussen and Insider Advantage shows Gingrich with a nine-point lead over Romney, with both Paul and Santorum fading into second-tier status. Gallup's five-day national tracking poll shows a virtual tie between the two Republican frontrunners nationally, which means that Gingrich probably won the last two days of the polling by a wide margin. The former House speaker, whose polling lead last year dissipated into a fourth-place finish in Iowa, has suddenly captured conservative momentum all over again.

Can it last? Pushing Gingrich to a resounding win certainly gave conservatives in the GOP a great deal of satisfaction, particularly because they tripped up Romney on his stroll down the path to a seemingly inevitable nomination. Romney himself bears much of the responsibility for this, not just because of his two debate fumbles last week, but for not connecting emotionally with the party's conservative base despite having had four years to do so. Conservatives wanted an emotional connection to a candidate, which Gingrich provided in spades during the final week before the South Carolina primary. His attack on questions from Juan Williams in the Fox debate and on John King during CNN's brought the live audience to their feet multiple times, while Romney debated the finer points of "maybe" for releasing his tax returns.