Mitt Romney vs. Newt Gingrich: Why delegate count will be close

Former Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney escalated his rivalry with Newt Gingrich on Monday with a series of pointed, personal attacks, signaling a more aggressive and negative shift in the race for the Republican presidential nomination.


Romney took his first jab in an early television interview in which he called on Gingrich to return the more than $1.6 million he earned from consulting for Freddie Mac — the start of a back-and-forth over which candidate is greedier.


Gingrich has said he served as a historian for the mortgage giant, to which Romney remarked: “That would make him the highest-paid historian in history.” Romney added, “One of the things that I think people recognize in Washington is that people go there to serve the people and then they stay there to serve themselves.”


Gingrich responded at a morning event in Londonderry, saying he would consider returning his Freddie Mac earnings “if Governor Romney would like to give back all the money he’s earned bankrupting companies and laying off employees over his years” — a reference to Romney’s time as head of the private equity firm Bain Capital.


But this year, the rules make that nigh impossible. Gingrich is polling in the 30 to 40 percent range in the early states. If those polls translate into actual voting numbers, he’ll have perhaps an 80 delegate edge (or about 6 percent of the total needed to win the nomination) coming out of the early contests - and that’s assuming he gets a sizable bump from all 50 Florida delegates.


That means Mitt Romney will still be very much in the hunt, especially when organization comes most acutely into play in the next phase of the campaign. Here are all of the “Super Tuesday” states that will be voting on March 6, 2012:


Arkansas, Georgia, Idaho, Massachusetts, North Dakota, Oklahoma, Tennessee, Texas, Virginia, Wyoming, Vermont. Total delegates: 556


This is where Mitt Romney could make serious hay, no matter the poll numbers. Winning 11 primaries on a single day without serious organization and funds would be a historic feat. As Romney backer and powerful GOP moneyman Vin Weber told The New York Times, “There are reasons we call things ‘conventional’ — because they work.”


However, once again, proportional representation of delegates likely would only get Romney back to an even tilt with Gingrich. That gets us into the third phase of the voting - from Super Tuesday through the first big group of winner-take-all states in April. That's 16 states with 655 delegates.


With a potentially fragmented delegate picture heading into April, it appears that if Romney can hang even with Gingrich up to this point, the map will then begin to favor him. It gets decidedly more Eastern - in fact, there’s only one state (Wisconsin) voting in April that isn’t within a cheap flight of Massachusetts.