ORLANDO, FL — The official line from the Rick Perry campaign following their surprising defeat by Herman Cain at the P5 straw poll is to congratulate Cain and call out Mitt Romney (who skipped the poll, officially) for not doing better.
But that spin can’t hide what really is a pretty epic fail for Team Perry in Florida this weekend.
“Mitt Romney’s been running for five-and-a-half years and you think he’d do better in a straw poll in a state like Florida,” campaign spokesman Mark Miner told reporters immediately after the poll results were announced.
Perry came in second to Cain with 15.4% of the 2,657 delegate votes cast here. Romney came in third with 14%.
“For Mitt Romney to come in third after five-and-a-half years is devastating,” Miner said.
Asked by TPM about the resources Perry had put into the winning poll — which were sizable even if you’re only counting the massive breakfast his campaign bought for delegates this morning, but went well beyond that — Miner declined to discuss the figures.
“We took it seriously,” he said. “Look, whenever you come to something like this, you hope to do the best you can.”
For what it’s worth, Cain crisscrossed Florida for a week prior to the straw poll. The Cain campaign told TPM they didn’t do any campaigning for delegates beyond Cain’s speeches and appearances. Delegates here told TPM they had received robocalls from the Perry campaign urging them to support him at P5.
But Cain did do one thing to rouse delegates that Perry didn’t — namely, offer up a stemwinder of an address to the P5 crowd before the voting that had the audience cheering. Perry didn’t speak at all and his dejected supporters told TPM after the vote that his absence had an effect.
“He might have been able to defend himself better,” Tony Jackson, a Perry volunteer from Hillsborough County said. “The straw poll probably would have been different [had Perry spoke.]”
Perry left Saturday morning, leaving a surrogate and this video to speak for him before the voting. His trip out of Florida put behind him a miserable debate performance and an attempt to spin it away that seemed to fall very flat here.
Adelle Blackman, a Perry supporter from Pinellas County, also said that Perry could’ve changed the results had he stuck around. The debate did damage, too, she said.
“He’s not a good debater, sadly,” she said.
But Blackman also criticized the campaign for not doing more to push back against criticisms over immigration, Social Security, Gardasil and the like that Perry has faced since entering the race a little over a month ago. She said the campaign is not responding well enough to memorable dings from his opponents both on the debate stage and off.
“It’s almost like the American people vote on soundbites,” she said. “They don’t check it out,” she added referring to the attacks on Perry’s record from his opponents.
