Crunch time is approaching for the Giuliani campaign. He's about to prove whether his strategy was genius or one of the stupidest strategies a national front-runner could possibly have won. He will have recast the future of presidential primary campaigns, or he will crash and burn and vindicate the theory of the power of the early states and perceptions. So far we've written off all his poor results, and they have been poor (he's lost to Ron Paul is many states) because 'Oh, he hasn't campaigned there', 'Oh, he's banking on Florida' but now Florida's coming up. It's a state in which he has spent a huge amount of time campaigning and has set his flag to the mast there. If he loses that, then all his poor showings begin compounding upon each other to make a Giuliani nomination about as likely as a Thompson nominaton.
And guess what? He may lose Florida. With all the other candidates stampeding down there at warp speed Rudy's free ride around Florida is over. McCain, Romney, Huckabee and Paul (I think Thompson won't be there) are coming to take away the support Giuliani has been working hard to build. He doesn't have a convincing poll lead in Flordia - in fact it's a tie between Giuliani and some of the other candidates - a bad situation when you consider the disparate resources invested by the different campaigns in Florida so far.
Giuliani's campaign was rested on the premise that 2008 would not see a king-making Iowa and New Hampshire, but would be a national campaign, fought and won on Super-Duper Tuesday. Giuliani wrote off those two early states and moved on, and put all his hope on Florida. But...he sort of forgot the other three contests before Florida. Okay, I applaud him challenging the king-makers of Iowa and New Hampshire...but what about Wyoming? And Michigan? And Nevada? And South Carolina? If it had been just Iowa and New Hampshire before Super-Duper Tuesday and he'd performed badly amongst, as Jon Stewart calls them, cold white people and colder whiter people then we wouldn't have minded. But we've had the Iowa, Wyoming, New Hampshire, Michigan, Nevada and South Carolina. Exactly how many states can you write off before you've written them *all* off and there's noone left to support you?
He hasn't pulled majority support from any of the major groups in these states, and we've now seen a lot of groups weigh in on the contest - white people, evangelicals, voters whose main concern is the economy, Hispanics, Republican African Americans, Northerners, Southerners, independents.... Is he really banking on all those retired New Yorkers? That is a hell of a gamble if you want to be the national nominee. I think the strategy might have worked back when there were only 3 contests before Super Tuesday, but now we have a more representative sample of the nation in the early states who vote...and none of them have liked Giuliani.
I know what you may say to me - 'Well, Romney lost Iowa and New Hampshire and he'd spent all his time and all his money there, but in your last post you said that Romney could still be the nominee.' Yes, but there's a difference between Romney and Giuliani. Romney lost, won, lost, won, won, lost. He used the early contests to pull back from the declarations that he was DOA. Giuliani has lost, lost, lost, lost, lost, lost. And after Florida...BAM...Super-Duper Tuesday. There's no time to remake himself as a winner if he doesn't win Florida.
There have got to be nerves amongst the Giuliani campaign. Not since John McCain in 2000 has one state mattered so much to one candidate. Cue Florida primary.
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