December 26, 2011 08:06 PM UTC

Newt's Longshot Gets Longer?

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• by: Colorado Pols

The Los Angeles Times updates over Christmas weekend:

Newt Gingrich’s campaign, having failed to meet the ballot requirements for Virginia’s Super Tuesday presidential primary, announced Saturday that it will ask his supporters to write in his name instead.

But Virginia law does not allow write-in ballots in primary elections.

The failure to get on the presidential primary ballot in the state of Virginia, where he lives, looks bad more than it is functionally bad for Newt Gingrich–who would certainly have the opportunity to show momentum before Super Tuesday. But the “looking bad” part is the last thing Gingrich needs as all eyes turn to the Iowa caucuses set for next week. ABC News:

“I think this race right now – unless somebody changes the dynamic in Iowa – is a race between Ron Paul, Mitt Romney and Newt Gingrich, all of whom have tremendous baggage and all of whom a majority of Republicans have worries about. But it’s going to be one of the three of those,” Republican strategist and ABC News political contributor Matthew Dowd said on “Good Morning America” today.

Much like in Colorado, where otherwise-confident Mitt Romney campaign organizers are really only sweating a Ron Paul “marring” of caucuses they’ve otherwise enjoyed a lock on organizing, the Paul campaign is a wild card in the Iowa caucuses: although we wonder if these Jim Welker-style newsletters in Paul’s past will deflate, if not Paul’s core supporters, the ability for the campaign to produce a large non-activist turnout. Romney and Paul are well-organized on the ground to turn out supporters, and Gingrich has focused his resources on Iowa–apparently a little too much (see: Virginia). If Gingrich can win in Iowa, he gets momentum he’ll need to survive his expected trouncing in New Hampshire’s primary a week later by Romney.

From there, Gingrich’s campaign lives or dies based on his ability to quickly organize expensive field operations in many states. In many places he’s going to run directly into a wall of groundwork that Romney has laid in places like Colorado–primary and caucus states alike. Setting aside Romney’s tepid embrace by the GOP, and unfulfilled desire for a viable alternative, Newt Gingrich simply hasn’t demonstrated the skills or the resources to mount a campaign on the scale required to win a presidential nomination. That’s the perception he must change.

While Romney has the resources to win, he needs to stop earning that tepid embrace.