Gingrich revamps campaign in order to stay in the hunt
With dwindling funds and a series of losses in key primaries, former House speaker Newt Gingrich overhauled his presidential campaign this week, shedding staff and scaling back travel in order to stay in the race until the Republican convention in August.
Gingrich and his backers insisted Wednesday that the decision to lay off one-third of his campaign staff and replace his campaign manager with longtime aide Vince Haley is not a signal that he is quitting the race.
Speaking at Georgetown University in Washington on Wednesday, Gingrich didn’t mention his revamped campaign but reiterated why he chose to run. He ended the speech — which was advertised as an address on Social Security but sounded more like his stump speech — by saying, “And that’s why I decided to run.”
Gingrich advisers said the new strategy, put together over two days, is to focus on the positive ideas Gingrich wanted to promote before he was bombarded with negative ads.
Former representative Bob Walker, a senior adviser to the Gingrich campaign, said the decision was largely a financial one but it also frees the campaign to focus on wooing convention delegates. “We are going to be able to actually campaign in a way that fits the endgame as we see it,” Walker said.
Walker said Mitt Romney’s inability to lock up the nomination at this point — despite the backing of major establishment figures — shows that the narrative of his “inevitability” is overstated.
According to the Associated Press, Romney has 568 of the 1,144 delegates needed to win the Republican nomination; former senator Rick Santorum has 273; and Gingrich has 135.
Kellyanne Conway, a Gingrich campaign adviser, said Gingrich feels “liberated” now that he is not as tied to ad buys and traditional fundraising activities.
“He will be speaking directly to delegates,” she said.
The path Gingrich is charting is not unique. Santorum, Romney and Rep. Ron Paul have all been courting “unbound delegates,” or those who are not committed to vote for a certain presidential contender.
Gingrich’s plan is based on Romney failing to get 1,144 delegates during the primaries, leading to a battle for votes on the convention floor.
Conway said the other candidates “can worry about the math; we’ll focus on chemistry.”
Gingrich had most recently based his campaign on a Southern strategy, but he lost primaries this month in Mississippi, Alabama and Louisiana.
The Gingrich campaign had about $1.6 million in debts and $1.5 million cash on hand at the end of February, according to its latest campaign-finance report. Some political analysts said it was unlikely the Gingrich campaign could last through the final primary contests in June.
“The campaign is out of money,” Republican strategist Rich Galen, a former Gingrich aide, told USA TODAY. “There is no reasonable expectation that he will do any better than third.”
Andrea Saul, a Romney spokeswoman, suggested that by remaining in the race, Gingrich and Santorum are only harming the Republican Party’s chances against President Obama.
“It’s sad to see senator Santorum and speaker Gingrich pushing for the Republican nominee to go through a brokered convention to come out with only 60 days to take on an incumbent president with $1 billion to spend,” she said.