Political Buzz

With the Republican presidential race turning to winner-take-all Florida and its fifty-seven delegates, former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani’s controversial strategy of ignoring the early primary and caucus states gets put to the test.  When last the Republican field heard from Giuliani, he was the leader in the national polls and favored in futures markets to win the nomination.  But two solid months of essentially not competing in Iowa, Wyoming, New Hampshire, Michigan, Nevada, and South Carolina has knocked America’s Mayor out of the headlines, and out of the lead.  Now Giuliani hopes to turn it all around with one signature primary win in a must-have state for the eventual nominee in the general election, the biggest prize to date in the Republican primary.

Giuliani’s staff anticipated his fall from frontrunner status all along.  At the end of December, just before the voting began in Iowa, the Giuliani campaign leaked a memorandum that touted the mayor’s lead in Florida and the three biggest prizes on Super Tuesday, February 5th:  California, New York, and New Jersey.  The memo predicted that polling data in January would be related to the early voting states and would look bad for the Giuliani campaign.  It counseled patience, confidence in the organization that the campaign had built in the state, as well as reliance on the “stable” polling data in Florida throughout the year.  It also foresaw “tightening” of the race in Florida and consolidation of Giuliani’s support there as candidates dropped out.  Giuliani’s campaign placed its bets on the Republican field remaining wide open through the end of January.

As it has turned out, the campaign is in many ways more wide open than Giuliani’s staff may have considered.  The strategy of ignoring the early states is a viable one if those states serve to winnow the field.  But heading into Florida’s January 29th primary, there are still three major candidates vying along with Giuliani for the diverse Republican electorate in the Sunshine State.  This means that Giuliani’s reliance on picking up support from the losers of the early contests has not panned out.  Gov. Mike Huckabee’s campaign likely serves as the biggest surprise to Giuliani.  Huckabee’s campaign retained enough strength from his Iowa caucus win to survive distant third place finishes in New Hampshire and Michigan and place strongly in South Carolina.  He remains in the race for Florida, although it is unclear if his campaign has the resources to compete nationally on Super Tuesday.  Gov. Mitt Romney and Sen. John McCain have traded victories in the last four states, meaning that their campaigns have more life than Giuliani’s advisors expected before the voting began.  Even Sen. Fred Thompson, who has dropped out of the race, has declined to make an endorsement.  So Giuliani’s hoped for infusion of support from disaffected supporters of other candidates goes unfulfilled.

The polls in Florida have proven to be less stable than the Giuliani campaign planned on as a result.  Giuliani now leads in only one poll, by one point.  He trails McCain in three others and Romney in a fourth.  The only thing consistent about the recent published polls is that Giuliani places second or statistically tied for second in all of them.  With one week to go before the voting, Giuliani has plenty of time to kick his organization into high gear and reestablish himself as the leader.  But it will certainly be harder than he had hoped.

To that end, Giuliani may have an ace up his sleeve.  Absentee ballots were sent out to Florida primary voters in December, when Giuliani was in a stronger state and national position.  Early voting began in the state last week.  While the other candidates were spending huge amounts of time and resources in the early states, Giuliani was doing the same in Florida, courting the absentees.  That strategy memo points out that by the time of the Iowa caucus, thousands of voters would have already cast their ballots in Florida, New York, and New Jersey, as well as others.  Florida voters had only seen Giuliani when they cast those votes, and the campaign needs to win a significant proportion of them.

Having seemingly settled on two choices, McCain and Romney, the Republican race may be about to get another shake up.  It is a testament to Giuliani’s campaign organization in Florida that he remains in second place there despite dropping out of national election coverage for close to two months.  Giuliani himself has remained remarkably consistent and on message all during that time.  There have been no dramatic policy statements or contrived events to drum up media attention.  True to his strategy, he has sat back and bided his time as the other candidates have battled each other through the Midwest, West, Northeast, and now the South.  Giuliani’s strategy depended upon that battle weakening the field before Florida.  On the surface it appears that it has strengthened McCain and Romney.  But the cool, calm, and collected mayor does not seem to be fazed by the turn of events.  Next Tuesday will tell whether Giuliani has been sitting in the catbird seat all along; or whether his campaign is the next to find itself on the outside looking in.

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Mark Impomeni is a contributing editor at RedState and covers the White House for AOL’s new political blog, The Political Machine. He writes a column with a conservative’s take on the state of the 2008 presidential race for Political-Buzz.com.

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Filed under: 2008, Republicans, Rudy Giuliani