Give that man a cigar!
Okay, my prediction: I give Florida to Romney, but just barely -- and not just because that, aside from an outright loss to Gingrich, is really an ugly scenario for him and I want to blog about it forever.
Me on January 23, "The GOP Primary Conflagration Comes to Florida (and My Prediction)"
Hey, I didn't say give him a good cigar. Turns out Romney took the Florida Primary not "just barely," but in a total rout, more than 46% to Newt's just under 32%. Santorum came in with around 13% and Paul came in at 7%.
What's funny is, if I'd thought about my geography a little more, I might have adjusted my language. I did suggest that if Romney took the I-4 corridor and the heavily populated areas north of Miami, he'd win. He did just that -- and then some.
He also took Miami/Dade, which I thought might be a little closer than it was (60% for Romney to an anemic 26% for Newt in that county). You can see on the TPM map (linked here, again), that Gingrich did win a handful of interior counties as well as the panhandle.
The most interesting thing about these results -- and where I may have been most right, in a mildly convoluted kind of way -- is that Newt Gingrich has vowed to press on, all the way to the convention. At the end of my post the other day, I said: "...Florida is on-track to make this long, bad couple of weeks for the Romney campaign even worse, and even longer."
Well, maybe Florida is not going to make Romney's campaign even more miserable or longer -- but Newt Gingrich sure will. Back in early January, I said, "I don't think it's over-the-top to say that Florida could lock it up for the Republicans. Even if Mitt does so, the legacy of this primary season remains the fight he had to wage to get there."
I guess Florida didn't "lock it up" for the GOP, but that part about the nasty legacy sure looks like it's coming true.
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As an aside, I just want to point you to DougJ's quick piece at Balloon-Juice on the percentage of negative spots run by the Romney and Gingrich campaigns.
Of the 1,012 spots Newt Gingrich’s campaign ran, 95% were negative. Mitt Romney’s campaign ran 3,276 ads and 99% were negative.
This goes to my piece from yesterday: what reasonable person would want to be a part of this nastiness?
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