CONCORD, N.H. — Newt Gingrich name-dropped local issues such as the Manchester VA hospital and talked up Granite State history on a frenetic final day of campaigning ahead of today’s New Hampshire primary, but all throughout he kept one eye on make-or-break South Carolina.
It is hard to gauge what would constitute success for Gingrich in today’s vote, as his campaign and its allies focus their resources on the next primary state. Improving on his fourth-place showing in Iowa would show momentum, but that is no easy task.
Mitt Romney, the former governor of neighboring Massachusetts, is widely expected to win, though polls have shown his lead dwindling. The rest of the field is a muddle. Gingrich and former Pennsylvania Sen. Rick Santorum are seeking conservative Republican non-Romney votes, while Texas Rep. Ron Paul and former Utah Gov. Jon Huntsman are courting Independents— who can vote in the primary.
At nearly every stop Monday, Gingrich cited the morning’s Suffolk University tracking poll as a sign of a fluid race: It showed Gingrich in fourth place with 11 percent of the vote, but his numbers are rising as Romney’s support has dropped to 33 percent.
“You folks are the best I know at deciding you’re not going to decide,” Gingrich told the Rotary Club in Nashua. “You have a greater capacity to be wooed over and over again than any group I’ve ever seen. And I know you take enormous pride in the polls just being wrong.”
As recently as three weeks ago in Virginia, Gingrich said he needed to finish in the top two in New Hampshire. Reminded of that comment during a brief interview with The Atlanta Journal-Constitution on Friday in Salem, N.H., he said at that point “we hadn’t had $4 million worth of negative advertising [in Iowa], so it takes a little while to recover.”
Gingrich has blamed the pre-caucus advertising onslaught, primarily by a Romney-aligned Super PAC, for his poor showing in Iowa.
The group, Restore Our Future, is advertising in South Carolina and Florida but the airwaves here are mostly clear, aside from sunny ads from Romney and Paul. South Carolina voters go to the polls Jan. 21, and the Florida primary is Jan. 31.
Gingrich said he sees New Hampshire as a test of the campaign’s new strategy to directly attack Romney.
Success today, he said, “is having drawn clearly the difference between being a Reagan conservative and a Massachusetts moderate, and then going to South Carolina. South Carolina is the decisive contest.”
On Monday, the campaign put out a new video detailing fees Romney increased as governor of Massachusetts — including quadrupling the fee on guns, which Gingrich insists will not please South Carolina voters.
A Gingrich-allied Super PAC, Winning Our Future, revealed Monday that it will spend $3.4 million on ads in South Carolina. The ad blitz will focus at least in part on Romney’s time at Bain Capital, an investment firm that often took over struggling companies and shed jobs in the process.
Gingrich noted that Romney’s history at Bain has been the subject of recent stories by the Wall Street Journal and Reuters, and that his Super PAC is not the only organization digging dirt.
Asked by a reporter in Manchester whether he was concerned about doing the Democrats’ work for them, Gingrich said, “If somebody’s going to crumble, they better crumble before the nomination. You don’t want to end up in September with a nominee that’s been untested and can’t stand it.
“It’s pretty clear to me that somewhere in the next week or so, Gov. Romney is going to have to have a fairly long press conference, and he’s going to have to answer a lot of questions. It’s not complicated.”
In a news release, Romney campaign spokeswoman Andrea Saul dismissed the talk as an “attack on free enterprise.”
Gingrich’s campaign faces an apparent disadvantage today in the ground game of organizing and turning out voters.
The Romney camp is the most established and organized in the state. He has a home here, this is his second cycle campaigning for president here and he has the endorsement of much of the state’s political establishment. From Thursday through Election Day, the Romney campaign said it was making 150,000 phone calls, knocking on 15,000 doors and deploying 1,000 volunteers throughout the state.
Huntsman, who skipped Iowa, has staked his strategy on New Hampshire and has conducted more than 150 events in the state.
Paul, a libertarian favorite, always draws in passionate volunteers — often from out of state. Nearly all of Gingrich’s events Sunday and Monday had Paul sign-wavers greeting attendees as they arrived and exited.
Santorum, who appeals most to Christian conservatives, has struggled to get a foothold here after coming in a virtual tie with Romney in Iowa. Still, his campaign announced a list of 99 “primary captains” around the state to organize voters.
The Gingrich operation has struggled with funding and was deeply in debt in midsummer, when much of its paid staff resigned en masse. The campaign did not send volunteers up from Georgia to New Hampshire — as it did in Iowa — choosing instead to route them to South Carolina.
As voting draws near, many New Hampshirites remained undecided. Brenda Willis of Derry said she was still trying to pick between Gingrich and Romney after watching Gingrich’s town hall Monday at a high school in Hudson. She liked what she heard, but she said she needed to research his position on education reform.
“It’s a big responsibility for New Hampshire because we do get to see the candidates up close and personal for a long period of time,” said Willis, who has seen Gingrich, Romney, Huntsman and Minnesota Rep. Michele Bachmann before she dropped out of the race.
“For the rest of the country, we have to pay attention and choose wisely.”
Particularly in Manchester, where a sizable Occupy the New Hampshire Primary tent city has arisen, the campaign has become somewhat of a carnival. Gingrich was scheduled to address volunteers inside his state headquarters, but he canceled the event due to security concerns as chanting Occupy protesters clogged the sidewalk.
Among the protesters was Vermin Supreme, a comedic perennial candidate who wears garish outfits and whose platform prominently includes tooth-brushing.
Asked if he scared away Gingrich, Supreme said: “I think that’s a fair assessment.”
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