January 21, 2012
Gingrich Wins South Carolina Primary, Upending G.O.P. Race
By JIM RUTENBERG
CHARLESTON, S.C. — Surprising his rivals and upending the highly unpredictable Republican race for the presidency, Newt Gingrich won the South Carolina primary on Saturday, just 10 days after a fifth-place finish in New Hampshire left the impression his candidacy was all but dead.
So strong was Mr. Gingrich’s performance that the major television networks declared him the winner the minute the polls closed, basing their projections on exit polls that showed him winning a plurality of voters among a wide swath of important Republican voting blocs.
According to surveys of voters leaving the polls, Mr. Gingrich outperformed the rest of the four-person field among evangelical Christians and Tea Party supporters, men and even women, who were expected to vote by comfortable margins in favor of Mitt Romney, the man who was presumed to be the front-runner as of just a few days ago.
Mr. Romney’s defeat is sure to raise new questions that have dogged him from the start of his campaign over whether he could win over the many conservatives, Tea Party adherents and religious voters who have viewed him with suspicion over his Massachusetts health care initiative and past support for abortion rights.
For Mr. Gingrich, the victory marked a decisive revival for a candidacy that had been declared dead at least twice, and which came back to life in the last days before the primary here partly because of his commanding debate performances, which his aides are using as a selling point in their argument that he provides the best challenge to President Obama.
The victory for the former House speaker effectively resets the Republican nominating contest for the next important test a week from Tuesday in Florida, which Mr. Romney’s campaign considers an important bulwark for his candidacy. It is one of the most expensive states to campaign in, and Mr. Romney’s aides have been counting on being able to outspend and outperform Mr. Gingrich there.
But as Mr. Gingrich began to climb rapidly in polls this week, and Mr. Romney’s aides prepared for defeat, they said they would not be so bold as to predict an easy time in Florida, given how the momentum could affect the dynamic of the next contest.
If nothing else, the fact that just over half of South Carolina voters said in exit polls that they made up their minds at the last minute shows just how fluid and restive the Republican electorate remains — a troubling sign for Mr. Romney that Mr. Gingrich is now poised to capitalize upon.
And after being so confident just 10 days ago — before its declared victory in Iowa was rescinded and Mr. Gingrich began his rise — the Romney campaign is now not only fighting the perception that Mr. Romney cannot consolidate broad support among conservative voters, but also at least one troubling fact of history: No Republican has gone on to win the party’s nomination without winning South Carolina since before 1980.
For Mr. Gingrich, victory followed a peripatetic trajectory in which he began as an acknowledged force who quickly stumbled over matters of foreign policy, personal style — in the form of his $500,000 line of credit at Tiffany’s — and a perceptible lack of campaign discipline that led several key aides to leave. Presumed dead, his candidacy sprang back to life in the late fall with a series of strong debate performances that propelled him to the front of the pack, according to polls.
Yet a barrage of news reports about his post-Congressional work, getting paid more than $1 million advising the government-sponsored mortgage providers Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae — at a time when fellow Republicans were seeking to dismantle them — took a toll.
And as the caucuses neared in Iowa, a “super PAC” promoting Mr. Romney, Restore Our Future, unleashed a torrent of advertisements against Mr. Gingrich that he had no money to defend against. He blamed the group, run by former aides to Mr. Romney, for his fourth-place showing in Iowa, which was followed by a fifth-place finish in New Hampshire.
A $5 million pledge from the casino magnate Sheldon Adelson to the pro-Gingrich group Winning Our Future gave Mr. Gingrich a clear boost here in South Carolina. The group went on to savage Mr. Romney for his past positions on guns and abortion rights and, most notably, his work at the corporate takeover firm Bain Capital, painting him as a cold-hearted corporate raider who traded away jobs for profits.
It is unclear how damaging that line of attack was, particularly, to Mr. Romney. An early poll of people leaving voting booths Saturday found that about two-thirds of South Carolina primary voters had a generally positive view of Mitt Romney’s background of investing in and restructuring companies.
In fact, even Mr. Gingrich’s rivals acknowledge that it was once again his performances at pivotal debates that most positively affected his showing here — notably at a Fox News debate on Monday in Myrtle Beach. It was there that he lambasted the Fox moderator Juan Williams for asking if some of Mr. Gingrich’s statements, like calling Mr. Obama a “food stamp president” and suggesting that poor children work as janitors to learn a work ethic, was not insensitive to black people.
The timing of his well-received debate performances appeared to come at just the right time: Preliminary exit poll results showed that about half of primary voters made up their minds within the last few days. And for nearly two-thirds of primary voters, the recent debates were important factors in their decision. About one in 10 said it was the most important factor.
Speaking outside a polling station at the Hazel V. Parker Playground here in Charleston, Lynn Land, 61, said she decided to vote for Mr. Gingrich “at the very last second,” complimenting him for showing an ability to think on his feet at the debates. “He is a seasoned politician and will be able to debate Obama on an even level,” Mrs. Land said.
Her husband, Joseph Land, 63, said he particularly liked the way that Mr. Gingrich had “handled the personal questions,” an allusion to an interview on ABC News this week in which Mr. Gingrich’s ex-wife Marianne Gingrich said he had asked her for an “open marriage”” while he was cheating on her with his current wife, Callista Gingrich, a former Congressional aide.
Political strategists at competing campaigns predicted that the report would hurt him among evangelicals and women here. The latter group, the thinking went at the time, was already unlikely to give him much support anyway.
But both of those assumptions were upended by an early exit poll of South Carolina voters, which found that women were at least evenly divided between Mr. Gingrich and Mr. Romney.
