After losing in Nevada in early February, Newt Gingrich spent most of the last month recreating his campaign and recalibrating expectations. This Sunday, two days before Super Tuesday, Gingrich resurfaced on the Sunday morning shows after being conspicuously absent for a few weeks to make his case for why he is still very much in the running. Even with only one state under his belt, Gingrich insisted it’s not over for him yet.
“I keep coming back,” said Gingrich on NBC’s Meet the Press. Turning the volatility of the presidential race into an argument that he is still a viable candidate, he continued, “I’ve twice been the front-runner in the national polls,” and “I think that we’re coming back again for the third time.”
Newt’s second reason, he said, is his expected victory in Georgia this week. Whereas Gingrich observed a few weeks ago that each candidate had to win his own home state to remain viable, Newt now casts a win in Georgia as a meaningful achievement. “We focused on it, and as a result, despite a lot of money spent against me, we’re doing very well and I think we’re going to win decisively,” Gingrich said Sunday. “And it is the biggest state in terms of delegates, it’s the biggest state on Super Tuesday.”
Gingrich emerged in February pushing a new set of talking points focused around energy and gas prices. He’s seen as unlikely to win a state outside of Georgia. But, as he told host Candy Crowley on CNN’s State of the Union, he expects to do well in Tennessee, Oklahoma, and Ohio, and cites the fact that he has been closing in on Rick Santorum in Gallup’s tracking poll over the last three weeks. But it’s his big ideas, he says, that will move his campaign forward. “I have basically a big solutions campaign,” he told Crowley, while Santorum, he predicted, would soon run into trouble outside of industrial states like Ohio.
But Gingrich’s closing argument going into Super Tuesday simply boils down to this: anything can happen. Crowley reminded Gingrich of his own advice to Santorum to get out of the race about a month ago, and asked why Gingrich shouldn’t now take his own advice and let the conservative vote consolidate around Santorum. Gingrich replied, “He stayed in. He was running fourth in every single primary. Suddenly, he went, very cleverly went to three states nobody else went to, and he became the media darling and bounced back.”
Newt’s pitch: I’ve bounced back. And I can do it again.
