NASHUA, N.H. ? The Republican presidential candidates have swept into New Hampshire so swiftly, you might be tricked into thinking that next Tuesday?s primary really matters.
But with Mitt Romney?s dominance here still unshaken, the other members of the GOP field are already plotting to make their strongest stand against the national front-runner in South Carolina ? a conservative state in the heart of a region in which Romney has long struggled to break through.
Continue ReadingWhile the results from the Iowa caucuses and a stream of national primary polling confirm that Republicans haven?t settled on Romney as their 2012 candidate, none of his rivals has yet been able to vault ahead of the pack and mount a sustained challenge to the former Massachusetts governor.
Now, Republicans in and outside the presidential campaigns believe South Carolina is the best ? and maybe the only ? opportunity left to put Romney?s grasp on the nomination in real peril.
?South Carolina will become the ground on which an ?ABM? movement starts to coalesce ? the anybody-but-Mitt crowd,? said Republican strategist and veteran South Carolina hand Tucker Eskew. ?Perhaps not successfully, but there will be a drive to coalesce that vote.?
For conservatives in particular, Eskew said the state is the most logical place to begin ?concentrating firepower on Gov. Romney?s right flank.?
Romney?s opponents plainly agree.
Even before the start of the Iowa caucuses on Tuesday, Newt Gingrich was pointing to South Carolina as the place where he would aim to take out Romney.
?The gap between Romney?s moderate Massachusetts views and Southern conservatism is, oh, about the distance from Boston to Charleston,? Gingrich said at one campaign stop.
Rick Perry is staking his whole campaign on the state, effectively skipping New Hampshire. The Texan lobbed a Gingrich-like attack in Romney?s direction in a CNN interview before the caucuses: ?A Massachusetts governor that put individual mandates in place that Obama took as the model to create Obamacare is not going to sell in South Carolina.?
And for weeks, Iowa almost-winner Rick Santorum has told voters that he hoped to finish strong in Iowa, beat expectations in New Hampshire ? and then truly take control of the race in South Carolina.
The result, New Hampshire politicos acknowledge, is that the next major inflection point in the GOP presidential race is less likely to be the Jan. 10 primary here, but 11 days later, when Republicans head to the polls in the first-in-the-South primary. Only Jon Huntsman, who has practically lived in New Hampshire, is expected to see his campaign live or die on the results here.
?If you can?t have a breakout moment in one of the first three states, you?re in trouble, and, for all of the conservatives, South Carolina is the most fertile ground,? said Charlie Arlinghaus, the New Hampshire politico who heads the conservative Josiah Bartlett Center for Public Policy. ?New Hampshire has been quieter this year than it?s been in the past because Romney has been so dominant here.?
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