Newt Gingrich never had much chance of winning the Republican presidential nomination. He has even less now that his campaign team has resigned, just 29 days after Gingrich formally announced he was running.
The Associated Press reported this afternoon:
Republican presidential hopeful Newt Gingrich's campaign manager, senior strategists and key aides in early delegate-selection states all resigned on Thursday, a mass exodus that leaves his hopes of winning the Republican nomination in tatters.
Rick Tyler, Gingrich's spokesman, said he, campaign manager Rob Johnson and senior strategists had resigned, along with aides in the early primary and caucus states of Iowa, New Hampshire and South Carolina.
Other officials said Gingrich was informed that his entire high command was quitting in a meeting earlier in the day. They cited differences over the direction of the campaign but were not more specific.
Interestingly, Tyler mentioned in the AP piece above is one of Gingrich's most trusted aides. "That's like Tonto and Silver leaving the Lone Ranger," someone tweeted.
Gingrich was reduced to putting out his response via a Facebook post: "I am committed to running the substantive, solutions-oriented campaign I set out to run earlier this spring. The campaign begins anew Sunday in Los Angeles."
A former Gingrich staffer told Politico: "We just had a different direction in which we wanted to take the campaign."
And then it emerged that Gingrich's staff in the crucial early voting states had also left the sinking ship:
Newt Gingrich's entire team of paid Iowa campaign staff, as well as his national spokesman and senior aides in New Hampshire and South Carolina, have resigned en masse, a staffer told The Des Moines Register.
"You have to be able to raise money to run a campaign and you have to invest time in fundraising and to campaign here in the state and I did not have the confidence that was going to be happening," said Craig Schoenfeld, the Iowa executive director of Newt 2012.
Taxi for Mr Gingrich....
Gingrich will be no great loss when he does pull out. The former Republican speaker of the house's awful polling numbers – with "unfavourability" ratings that matched even Sarah Palin – meant that he was really running for the profile and the enhanced speaker fees that a modern presidential run can generate. But his gadfly-ish comments about the Ryan budget proposals killed off any last barrel-scraping of support.
Either Gingrich's staff figured that out – possibly last week, after Newt went on a luxury Mediterranean cruise when he should have been shaking hands in Iowa – or they got a better offer from a more serious candidate, possibly Texas governor Rick Perry, who has hinted at running recently.
Before the news broke, RedState founder Erik Erickson had suggested:
More troubling is growing buzz among high level donors and politicos in Washington that his campaign is disintegrating while Gingrich is out of the country.
And so it proved.
The only remaining question is whether Gingrich will show up for the first proper Republican presidential primary in New Hampshire on Monday.
