Newt’s unconventional NH campaign senses momentum shift

MANCHESTER, N.H. — Until late last week, former Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich’s New Hampshire campaign headquarters had no landlines. The toilet seat in the ladies room is the wrong size for the toilet. On Tuesday when a Daily Caller reporter arrived, staffers were just setting up the computer system to run a phone bank.

But with 13 paid staffers, it is decidedly a campaign organization, if a proudly unconventional one.

The organization has improved light years during the past few weeks, said former New Hampshire Sen. Bob Smith, who has endorsed Gingrich and has been campaigning as a surrogate for the speaker throughout the state.

“They did criticize the organization here early on, maybe with some justification. I mean people quit three, four months ago, so we had to build all that back, but it was really Newt who got the people motivated,” he said.

Indeed, it’s hard to deny the groundswell of support for the former speaker. An event hosted Monday night by the Southern New Hampshire 9/12 Project reportedly drew 1,250 people to Windham High School, though the venue could hold only 600 audience members, making it possibly the largest Granite State campaign event by any candidate yet.

For Gingrich’s New Hampshire staff, this support lends some validation to their unconventional campaign set-up. For instance, Andrew Hemingway, Gingrich’s New Hampshire state director, came to the campaign with little political background. An ardent tea partier, he was introduced to the former speaker by none other than Dave Carney — now Texas Gov. Rick Perry’s campaign manager — who defected from the Gingrich campaign during the summer, along with much of the former House Speaker’s staff.

Hemingway’s first business was Online Sports Coaching, which filmed professional sports coaches and put the videos online to teach parents how to be better coaches. Carney thought he might be able to help Gingrich apply the same technique to train activists in grassroots campaigning.

As something of a political outsider, running a campaign that Smith described as the “outsider” campaign competing against Mitt Romney’s “establishment” candidacy, Hemingway said he came to the campaign with fresh eyes. (RELATED: Full coverage of Newt Gingrich)

“I ask the question ‘why?’ a lot,” he told The Daily Caller. “It seems really simple, but really, it’s like, ‘Why? Why are we doing a direct mail piece? Why are we doing phone banks?’”

“So I’m coming in at it without a political background, so when people say, ‘oh, we’ve got to do this, we’ve got to do that,’ you know: Why? It doesn’t seem like many people really ask why in politics today,” he continued. “It’s just like, ‘this is what you do.’”

Hemingway initially reacted with this type of skepticism to the idea that it was necessary to have a landline phone in the campaign headquarters.

“We’ve been dogged here in the press for not having phones,” Hemingway said, citing Karl Rove and Time’s Mark Halperin as sources of criticism.

“The question is why,” he continued. “We’ve had a phone designated for the office. It’s a cell phone. We just went across the street and bought a phone. To set it up, it’s like 30 dollars, but for some reason we have to have landlines or we’re not a legit organization.”

Ultimately, however, Hemingway came around to the idea of landlines, which were finally installed late last week.

“I bowed to the pressure of the mainstream media. Karl Rove and Mark Halperin are influential people,” he joked. In fact, he said, it was to facilitate the increasing number of media requests and radio interviews they were doing, “something I hadn’t thought about” at first, he said.

“Maybe, at the end of the day, you ask ‘why?’ and you go through this process, and you go fine, ok, you were right,” he said. “But at least we’re asking the question.”

His first call, he said, was to Halperin.

“Oh Mark, by the way, I have a phone now,” he joked. “I didn’t even know who he was at first. I’m like, ‘Are you from Manchester?’ He probably didn’t like that.”

NEXT: 'I can feel the momentum'