For the first time since his campaign began, the usually unflappable Mitt Romney is looking like a candidate in crisis in Florida. And Democrats don’t want it to end anytime soon.
As the campaign begins to hinge on Mitt Romney’s record at Bain Capital and his tax returns, the gap between Democrats’ general election messaging and Newt Gingrich’s primary messaging is closing fast. Any damage Romney suffers from this point from either of those categories is a long term win.
“The central rationale of Mitt Romney’s campaign is cratering,” Debbie Wasserman Schultz told reporters after Romney’s South Carolina loss, a line that DNC officials have repeated like a mantra over the last 48 hours.
Democrats are challenging Romney to release not just his tax returns from recent years, but returns dating back to years in which his finances were more closely tied to Bain Capital. The argument goes that if Romney is going to run on his time leading the private equity firm, voters should be able to see the full picture of his record.
DNC communications director Brad Woodhouse told reporters on Monday that the early 2000s might be a good measure and would put Romney’s releases in line with his father, George Romney, who made public a dozen years of returns when he ran for president in 1968.
Obama’s re-election team, who would love to see Gingrich either win or extend the primary into a lengthy bruiser, is playing up Romney’s weaknesses as a candidate, a nod to Republican voters that perhaps his vaunted electability isn’t all its cracked up to be.
“Even Republican voters are increasingly skeptical and opposed to the prospect of Mitt Romney becoming their nominee,” Obama campaign manager Jim Messina wrote in a lengthy memo on Romney’s campaign Monday. “His lack of core not only hurts him with independents and moderates, but also with the Republican base. He came into South Carolina with a double-digit lead, and came out with a double-digit loss.”
Added Messina: “The bottom line is this: the more voters learn about Romney, the more unfavorably they view him.”
Gingrich, whose biggest obstacle may be convincing Republicans that a raft of general election polling favoring Romney overstates his relative strength, is clearly the benficiary of these kinds of arguments.
At the same time, Florida’s unique demographics offer Democrats an opportunity to highlight several general election angles they they hope to use against Romney should he win the nomination. At the top of the list is immigration: Florida has a huge and varied Hispanic population and Romney has tacked hard right on the issue in the primaries, threatening to veto the DREAM act and chiding rivals for suggesting that some illegal immigrants be granted residency rather than deported en masse.
“Romney’s immigration position, which would be the most extreme of any nominee in recent history, will hurt him with Hispanic voters,” Messina wrote.
Democrats are also bringing up Romney’s October quote warning that federal officials should let the foreclosure crisis “run its course and hit the bottom,” which they hope will resonate in a state that was hit disproportionately hard by the housing market collapse. Party officials are also hoping to acquaint Florida’s senior population with Romney’s support for Paul Ryan’s plan to replace Medicare with a private voucher system (his own proposal, still incomplete, would modify Ryan’s somewhat to keep some version of Medicare alongside private plans).
The good news for Democrats on all these fronts, however, is that Gingrich is actually on Romney’s left for at least two of these issues already, meaning that he may end up amplifying their message yet again. The former Speaker has made a big effort for years to woo Hispanic voters into the GOP fold and a Super PAC supporting him is running Spanish-language ads in Florida labeling Romney “anti-immigrant.” Gingrich also has done disproportionately well with seniors throughout the primary, perhaps thanks in part to his very public rebuke of the Ryan plan as “right wing social engineering.”
The danger for the Democrats is that they could come on too strong, and allow the Romney camp to pull a jujitsu flip. Romney’s team have long pushed the message that Team Obama’s focus on their man shows that he’s the candidate they fear the most. Romney spokeswoman Andrea Saul was at it again Monday, telling ABC News that the latest broadsides were part of a “strategy to ‘kill Romney,’ the same way they engaged in a campaign of personal destruction against Hillary Clinton.” So far, however, the Romney team’s ninja efforts seem to have fallen flat, and the Democrats are wholeheartedly embracing the chance to get in early messages that they hope to flesh out in the general election.
