All eyes are now on Florida as the top Republican candidates battle for their party’s nomination to face off President Obama in the upcoming presidential contest in November.
With early voting already underway in the Sunshine State, former speaker Newt Gingrich, fresh from his surprise win in South Carolina on Saturday, will be seeking to consolidate his front winner status and hoping to halt Mitt Romney’s march toward the GOP nomination. But first, Gingrich, who is expected to begin wooing voters in earnest on Wednesday, would have to surmount limited cash and organizational challenges, as he did in South Carolina.
Meanwhile, Romney, who is already in Florida, asked a crowd of enthusiastic supporters in Ormond Beach on Sunday night if they were ready to send Barack Obama home from the White House, to which the audience replied a resounding yes.
“This is a decision point for this country,” Romney told the raucous crowd, nsbnews.net reports. Romney added that Obama supports big government while he supports a lean and simple government. As he has said in the past, Romney reiterated that, if elected president, he would repeal Obamacare, to which the crowd roared their approval, once more.
Romney then trained his sights on Gingrich telling the crowd the former house speaker was a weak leader and a failed one who resigned in disgrace.
“Speaker Gingrich has also been a leader,” he said, news-journalonline.com reports. “He was a leader for four years as speaker of the House. At the end of four years, it was proven he was a failed leader, and he had to resign in disgrace.”
Rick Santorum, the now declared winner of the Iowa caucus, told a much smaller crowd in Coral Springs outside Fort Lauderdale on Sunday night, the race is wide open and Florida is a swing state. He dismissed the notion that there are only two front runners in the GOP presidential race – Gingrich and Romney.
“You have three candidates who can be president. That wasn’t the case moving into South Carolina,” he added, politico.com reports. “Florida can now step back and say, ‘Okay…who is the candidate that we here in South Florida should put our seal of approval on?”
While Santorum attacked his rivals, he had especially harsh words for Gingrich, whom he said didn’t lead like a conservative when he was house speaker, eventually being tossed out by his own party.
Ron Paul, with virtually no organization on the ground in Florida, is unlikely to be a serious contender for the nomination. However, Paul is expected to participate in the first GOP presidential debate on Monday night which will be held at the University of South Florida campus in Tampa, beginning at 9:00 p.m. NBC’s Brian Williams will moderate the debate and panelists include Adam Smith of the Tampa Bay Times and Beth Reinhard of the National Journal.
Florida’s primary will take place on Tuesday, January 31, 2012.
