I was going to title this column “Why Newt Gingrich Can Win,” but then I realized that about this time last month I was writing a “Why Herman Cain Can Win” column and I’d essentially be recycling the same material. Both candidates have the potential to win the nomination without building the types of organizations that have traditionally been needed, because we’re entering an era in American politics where a candidate’s media and public relations skills are more important than his campaign’s ground organization, traditional fundraising prowess or paid advertising.
Modern life is saturated with information. We wake up in the morning and read our “newspaper” on our iPads. Every office building has cable news blaring in the lobby. We sit at our computers all day at work, and when we’re not at work, we’re catching up with our tweeps on our smart phones. There really is no escape — even if you try to avoid the news like the plague, you’ll see it on your Internet homepage or a friend will post it on Facebook. Large chunks of the population see every breaking news event as it happens, sometimes against their will, and hence they are less reliant on campaigns for information about the candidates than they used to be. It also means that “earned media” opportunities, like good debate performances, travel faster and are viewed by more people than they once were. In such a milieu, a few good one-liners at a debate will be viewed tens of thousands of times on YouTube, dwarfing the impact of a campaign ad — and the increased impact is compounded by an increase in the number of debates. Smaller campaigns with less funding and less organization can surge to the front of the pack due to the relative parity of media coverage, and those poll surges are followed by crowd-sourced fundraising surges made possible by the ease of donating online. In fact, moneybomb-style fundraising may have changed politics more than any other Internet innovation.
Of course, that’s the happy side of a two-faced story. The not-so-happy side is that such an environment generates boom-and-bust cycles. Positive information may travel faster in the Internet age, but negative information travels just as fast, as Herman Cain is discovering.
Cain’s collapse has led some to claim that insurgents like Cain (and, by implication, Gingrich) are incapable of actually winning a nomination, but I don’t think that’s true. For one, not all candidates are created equal and some will adapt better than others. Gingrich, for instance, brings a good deal of media-savvy to the table and may survive better in the current environment than Cain has. It’s also worth noting that there’s nothing wrong with being the flavor of the month — if it’s the right month. Voters, especially in Iowa, are still stubbornly refusing to back Romney, so there’s every reason to believe that whoever is surging in early January will win.
And while we’re on the subject of Iowa, it’s worth noting that three of the four candidates topping the polls there (Gingrich, Romney, Cain) have spent very little time building ground games in the state. With 24/7 news coverage, you no longer have to meet a candidate at a backyard barbecue to get a feel for that person’s positive and negative traits, and this new familiarity is showing up in the polls.
Now, that’s not to say that traditional campaigns with lots of fundraising and on-the-ground organization are dead. Mitt Romney is getting by quite nicely, and if he wasn’t so unpopular with conservative voters, his well-oiled campaign would have made him the prohibitive front-runner.
Perry also shot to the top precisely because he was seen as a conservative dreamboat who could put together a strong organization. Indeed, he had the type of campaign that could have won an election just 10 years ago. But in today’s political environment, it’s difficult for a candidate who is gaffe-prone or a poor debater to survive. Perry is both.
Of the candidates who have run traditional campaigns, only Romney is still in contention, and that’s only because of his eloquence and calmness under pressure. However, even he runs the risk of being “too boring” to compete with upstarts like Cain and Gingrich.
So, will Newt Gingrich win the nomination? I don’t know, but he certainly has far more experience dealing with the media than Cain does. More importantly, he’s shown the ability to peel off large numbers of Romney voters, an accomplishment that eluded all of the previous “not Romney” options. So, there’s reason to think he has enough staying power to last the month until the Iowa caucuses, especially if he can widen his lead by pushing down Romney. However, in this boom-and-bust cycle, that may not be enough. We could end up seeing a Santorum boom, or even a Paul boom, or we could see a Gingrich crash feed support back to Herman Cain. We may see a number of conservative candidates split the conservative vote enough for Romney to win after all. Regardless of who ends up winning, we will have seen a sea-change in the way politics is played, and that will be the real legacy of this election.
Adam Brickley was the founder of the website “Draft Sarah Sarah Palin for Vice President” (palinforvp.blogspot.com). He has contributed to Race42012.com and The Weekly Standard’s blog, and is a contributor at Conservatives4Palin.com.