BLOOMINGTON, Minn. -- Newt Gingrich did not hire someone to lead his Minnesota campaign until about a week before Tuesday's caucus vote and set foot in the state for only a couple of hours Monday.
Gingrich is looking past the three states voting Tuesday in the race for the Republican presidential nomination -- he plans to spend the day campaigning in Ohio, which votes next month. But of the three, Minnesota presents the best opportunity for him to pick up several convention delegates.
Still, the state’s frozen lakes are far from his Southern base, and Gingrich's shoestring campaign here mimics his ad hoc approach to many of the states voting in February, where Gingrich is girding for a series of losses as his lone win in South Carolina recedes further into memory.
Front-runner Mitt Romney is widely expected to romp in the Colorado caucuses -- he has a victory rally scheduled Tuesday night in Denver -- and Gingrich is not on the ballot in Missouri’s “beauty contest” primary, which is not binding on the state’s delegates.
That leaves Minnesota, home to a quirky, conservative GOP base and an unpredictable open caucus. Romney won here in 2008 but is trying to play down expectations, canceling an event here Monday and leaving the campaigning here to former Minnesota Gov. Tim Pawlenty, once a presidential hopeful, himself. Former Sen. Rick Santorum of Pennsylvania and Rep. Ron Paul of Texas have spent time campaigning here, and only Paul will be in Minnesota on caucus night.
A Public Policy Polling survey of likely Minnesota GOP caucusgoers taken Saturday showed all four candidates within 10 percentage points of each other, with Santorum ahead with 29 percent of the vote and Gingrich in third with 22 percent. The poll’s margin of error was 4.8 percent. (A similar PPP poll of Colorado showed Romney well ahead, with 40 percent of the vote.)
Cyndy Brucato, a Minneapolis-based Republican consultant and former television broadcaster, gave Romney a “very, very slight edge” for his establishment support but said the race overall is a tossup.
Paul’s supporters are fervent, and he “really kind of attracts the kind of voter that Minnesota tends to put out, a little bit independent and kind of a looking for something to be off the beaten track,” she said.
As for Gingrich, Brucato said the former U.S. House speaker from Georgia “is the kind of iconoclast that Minnesota voters would take to if it didn’t have this kind of strange tint around the edges.” The “tint,” Brucato added, comes from the various forms of “baggage” that Romney and other Gingrich foes have pressed, particularly on television.
While Minnesota’s neighbor to the South, Iowa, was bombarded with televised attacks -- largely from the Romney-tied Super PAC Restore Our Future -- Minnesota has been largely spared the media wars that hit earlier states in the nominating process. Restore Our Future purchased a comparatively modest $131,000 in media time to attack Gingrich here last week, with no other Minnesota expenditures reported to the Federal Election Commission as of Monday.
Team Romney instead spent its energy Monday attacking Santorum for supporting earmarks during his Senate career. The Santorum campaign was flattered by the attention, sending out a news release titled: “Santorum surge prompts Romney to use attack machine.”
Missouri’s vote will test the strength of that surge. With Gingrich not on the ballot, Santorum is hoping for a win to show that he is the strongest conservative alternative to Romney. Santorum and Gingrich have been vying for the same conservative votes in the early states.
After missing the deadline in November, Gingrich’s campaign said it was simply being frugal by not paying the $1,000 filing fee to get on the primary ballot in Missouri, considering that no delegates are at stake there. Its delegates will be awarded at a caucus in March.
The Colorado and Minnesota caucuses are also "nonbinding," as the delegates are officially chosen at later party conventions and only bound to the caucus vote if the state convention passes a resolution to do so.
Forty delegates are at stake in Minnesota, with 36 being awarded in Colorado, proportionally based on how much of the vote share each candidate has. According to a delegate counter maintained by The Wall Street Journal, Romney leads the field with 101 pledged delegates, followed by Gingrich with 32, Santorum with 17 and Paul with 9. A candidate needs 1,144 delegates to clinch the nomination.
As Gingrich plans to campaign Tuesday in Ohio, which like Georgia votes March 6 on what is billed as Super Tuesday, the job of turning out voters in Minnesota is left to a bare-bones team. Gingrich’s Minnesota headquarters is in a hotel conference room in suburban Minneapolis, where just four people were making phone calls and writing emails Monday morning.
The effort is led by David FitzSimmons, a former supporter of Minnesota Rep. Michele Bachmann’s campaign who signed on with Gingrich only a week ago, he said. Asked how tough it is to organize caucusgoers in that span of time, he chuckled and said “very difficult.”
Still, FitzSimmons insisted “a win is what we’re going for.”
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