Perry’s N.H. campaign on hold; Iowa do or die
Former governor’s Granite State director joins John Kasich camp.
Former Gov. Rick Perry’s New Hampshire campaign is now effectively on hold, with his political director in the firstin-the- nation primary state
joining the rival campaign of Ohio Gov. John Kasich, and raising fresh questions about whether Perry will remain in the GOP presidential race.
“He has no plans to come to New Hampshire, and my unsolicited advice to the Perry campaign was to camp out in Iowa,” Mike Dennehy, a top New Hampshire political operative who was guiding the Perry campaign in the state, told the American-Statesman on Wednesday. Dennehy said he wouldn’t work for anyone else as long as Perry remains in the race, but there is no active Perry campaign in the Granite State.
Dennehy said he hadn’t
heard from the campaign in a month and had avoided reporters’ questions until the Kasich campaign announced this week that it was bringing Perry’s New Hampshire political director, Dante Vitagliano, on as its director of operations in the state.
Perry’s third full-time New Hampshire staffffffffffff er, Ryder Selmi, left the campaign to take a job with the Republican National Committee.
“They love Gov. Perry, and they would have loved to continue to work for him,” Dennehy said of Vitagliano and Selmi, but when they stopped getting paid over the summer, he had encouraged them to look for work.
Strapped for cash, Perry’s staffff in Iowa is down to one paid operative, Jamie Johnson, who is senior director with the national campaign. But a pro-Perry super PAC has been hiring staffff for a parallel operation in Iowa.
“I continue to think Rick Perry is the best qualifified candidate and the candidate who best connec ts with the middle class of America, but it just continues to be a struggle to break through the crowd, especially when one candidate is getting the lion’s share of attention,” Dennehy said, referring to front-runner Donald Trump.
Perry’s former Iowa campaign chairman, Sam Clovis, recently signed on with as national co-chairman of Trump’s campaign. Karen Fesler,
another top Perry Iowa operative, has rejoined the campaign of former U.S. Sen. Rick Santorum of Pennsylvania.
“Gov. Perry continues to travel the country sharing his optimistic vision for the future of the country and his proven record of success, and he contin
ues to focus on competing in the early states,” spokeswoman Lucy Nashed said in a statement. “Whether it’s his time serving as governor of the 12th largest economy in the world, stepping in when Washington, D.C., failed to secure our border, or serving our country in the U.S. Air Force, Gov. Perry’s record is unmatched by any other candidate in the fifield.”
Perry, who has devoted himself to preparing for a second run that could overcome memories of his disastrous campaign four years ago, succeeded in rebranding himself for many political insiders, but he has gained no traction in a rich Republican fifield.
Perry’s poll numbers, never high this time around, have been sinking, and he will once again be excluded from the main debate stage when the Republican candidates gather for their second debate, this one at the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library in California on Sept. 16, which will be broadcast on CNN.
A master of retail campaigning, Perry must now decide whether to live offff the land in Iowa in hopes of reviving his fortunes but at the peril of squandering some of the dignity he might have gained in his rehabilitation run.
Southern Methodist University political scientist Cal Jillson said that, whatever the improvements in candidate Perry this time around, they were mostly unseen by a public that passed judgment on him four years ago and had little reason to give him a second look.
For all his vaunted skills as a sure-footed Texas politician — the state’s longest-serving governor, never losing a political race — Jillson said Perry was ultimately “local fauna,” a politician so Texan “he can’t get a serious hearing outside of Texas.”
“I think he’s going to have to get out of the race, but the idea of saving his dignity, that horse is out of the barn,” Jillson said.
Even in Texas, Perry’s ratings have suffffered a precipitous drop.
“We were seeing signs in our polling back in February that Rick Perry’s popularit y and centrality to Texas politics really decayed rapidly,” said Jim Henson, who leads the Texas Politics Project at the University of Texas and conducts the UT/Texas Tribune Poll. “He never really recovered in Texas from what happened in 2011.”