Newt Gingrich in Iowa: Scaling Up His Campaign
By Alex Altman | @aaltman82 | December 7, 2011 | +
Photo by Eric Thayer / The New York Times / Redux
GOP presidential candidate Newt Gingrich speaks at the Victory Club dinner in Des Moines, Iowa, on December 1, 2011.
Urbandale, Iowa — In the southwest corner of a low-slung office building in the Des Moines suburbs, the hottest presidential campaign struggles to get organized. Newt Gingrich's Iowa headquarters is a ground-floor suite with scattered boxes of cell phones on bare industrial carpeting and a handful of empty folding tables waiting for the expected influx of volunteers. It opened six days ago. The cell phones—no plans to install landlines since they only intend to stay a month—just arrived on Tuesday. For now, the front desk is manned by a super-volunteer named Judy Reynolds, who drove to Des Moines from Culver, Indiana, the Monday before Thanksgiving and signed a six-week lease on a studio apartment. "It would certainly be sweet if we had 30 volunteers, 30 phones going all at once," she says. For now, she's happy to sit alone near a spangly Christmas tree, working 10-hour shifts, seven days a week, spreading the gospel of Gingrich. And spread it he has. Since Saturday, a quartet of polls have shown the former House speaker leading his GOP rivals in Iowa by margins of between seven and 15 points. Gingrich is now the undisputed favorite in Iowa, which means he carries the weight of expectations that come with it. Perhaps the most curious aspect of his unlikely rise in Iowa is how it has been masked by what, until recently, was an almost nonexistent campaign organization, one of the most inconsistent in the field. That's changing. Gingrich has begun staffing up in each of the early primary battlegrounds as he's climbed into pole position in the Republican presidential primaries. But in a state whose caucus system requires supporters to troop en masse to church basements and elementary schools on a frigid winter night, Gingrich still has only the thinnest semblance of a ground game. Whether he can build one, indeed whether he needs one at all, is among the most critical questions hanging over the race with just 28 days to go.
This wasn't how Gingrich or his staff originally scripted things. "Of course our inclination first in Iowa, when we had relatively full staffing, was to hit all 99 counties, get our chairs set," recalls Linda Upmeyer, the chairwoman of Gingrich's Iowa campaign and the state House majority leader. But her campaign imploded last summer, with a mass exodus of staff amid widespread doubts about his commitment to a process marked by a Greek island vacation and a scattershot campaign schedule. "When the staff left," Upmeyer says, "what we agreed on was running a race that put him in front of as many people as possible and not for how much we could do to get caucus turnout and a big list of volunteers." More than any other candidate, Gingrich was propelled by his stellar performances in the GOP debates. "The debates added a new dimension," Upmeyer says. With little money in the campaign coffers, Gingrich shrewdly capitalized on free media and pinched pennies, showing up at events where he didn't have to pay the tab: GOP county forums, cattle calls for interest groups. Even now, as poll after poll shows him positioned atop the field, he's forced to barnstorm the state to raise funds for what might have been a 50-state war of attrition with Mitt Romney's well-oiled machine. First, though, he must win Iowa; anything less now would be a paralyzing disappointment. And it won't be as easy as current polls suggest. Gingrich trails Romney in fundraising and Ron Paul in organization. With only seven paid staffers currently in the state, it seems impossible for him to assemble a traditional ground operation—training volunteers, registering 25,000 weekly phone calls, lining up a captain for each of Iowa's 1,784 precincts—in time to turn out voters on January 3. "No way," says Tim Albrecht, the spokesman for Iowa Republican Governor Terry Branstad. "But not necessarily." Gingrich's decision to skip an Iowa campaign stop for a meeting room powwow with Donald Trump could come back to haunt him as Rick Santorum circles to remind caucusgoers of his light footprint. But this year, most candidates have skipped Iowa's cornfields and scaled back their organizations; none have announced 99 county chairs, once a simple benchmark for any legitimate caucus winner. Part of the calculation may be informed by the success Mike Huckabee achieved four years ago when he upset the colossus Romney campaign despite running a lean, seasoned operation fueled by a passionate bloc of supporters. "There's a Huckabee-esque quality to his campaign," Albrecht says of Gingrich. "It's not perhaps as passionate or as large, but it shouldn't be. With a skeletal staff, they have to bank on supporters organizing themselves." This is one of the pillars of Gingrich's campaign strategy. His team is betting—not unreasonably—that his growing cadre of supporters, inspired by his disquisitions on a nation at a crossroads, recognize the stakes of the caucuses and will mobilize on their own. "You can rent a lot of people and claim to have a strong organization, but at the end of the day you still need the right candidate," says Katie Koberg, one of Gingrich's early Iowa staffers who returned last month to help orchestrate the final push. Koberg says the campaign has a playbook for the final four weeks, but much of the direction will trickle down from an "incredibly relaxed" and confident candidate given to flights of improvisation. At a recent meeting, she recalls, Gingrich scribbled a slogan on a piece of paper and passed it to her. The line—"Restore the America We Love"—became the theme of his first statewide television ad, titled "Rebuild the America We Love." For many Iowa Republicans, these big themes—both solar and optimistic yet set against a backdrop of economic distress and high unemployment—have helped lift Gingrich above the rest of the field, neutralizing his weaknesses in the process. He's beating Romney on his home turf—economic expertise and budget deficits—and boasts a lead on general election viability. The most confounding thing is that he's captured the Tea Party vote despite being a Washington veteran who supported TARP, championed a health insurance mandate, and collaborated with Nancy Pelosi on climate change. But Gingrich's missteps are far from the minds of die-hard supporters like Judy Reynolds. "There are individual issues I don't agree with him on," she says. "But I don't know anyone with the depth of experience he has. I think he's brilliant. I think he thinks outside the box." The Gingrich team believes that in a strange year, in a party desperately searching for a standard-bearer capable of matching Barack Obama's intelligence on a debate stage, that will be enough.
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