As expected Willard Romney won Florida walking away, and that means he gets all the available delegates in Florida (Which I believe would have been more but didn’t they get stripped down a little?). Gingrich for his part is vowing to fight on. I’m not sure if that means vowing to fight on, or vowing to shake Romney down for millions at some point.
(CNN) — Romney had 46%, compared with 32% for Newt Gingrich, 13% for former Sen. Rick Santorum of Pennsylvania and 7% for Rep. Ron Paul of Texas, according to the Florida Department of State. The win “feels pretty darn good,” Romney told CNN on Wednesday morning. “Florida, in some respects, is a microcosm of the nation.” The victory gave Romney all 50 of Florida’s convention delegates, and more importantly, new momentum heading into a series of caucuses and primaries building up to Super Tuesday on March 6 when 10 states will hold nominating contests.
Gingrich actually went into Florida with some serious mo of his own after a double-digit victory in South Carolina. But Romney went negative big time and tore the little silver-haired loudmouth down. Newt is now whining about negative ads. That’s a true moment of hilarity coming from the guy who once famously advised Republicans to always refer to democrats using terms like coward and traitor. The fact is negative ads often work in general, but they work spectularly on a candidate like Gingrich, who has so many legit negatives to exploit it’s not easy to settle on just two or three. Time to go to the lobby and get ourselves a snack!
He may not get all of them. There’s a push to make Florida proportional (perhaps in exchange for rescinding the strip-down they got for holding an early primary.
I can see Newt pushing this hard at the convention.
Shades of Humphrey-McGovern in 1972, fighting over California delegates. The upshot was that McGovern’s forces had to fight for upholding the rules and retaining those delegates at the convention, when they should have been vetting VP candidates. That failure hurt.