Mitt Romney’s supporters at the Tampa Convention Centre were so confident their candidate was going to win Tuesday night that they began a countdown until the moment the polls in Florida closed.
And they were right to be so confident.
Romney’s double-digit win in the bitterly contested Florida Republican primary restored his status as the clear frontrunner in the Republican presidential race, 10 days after Newt Gingrich’s upset victory in South Carolina stunned Romney’s well-financed and heavily favoured campaign.
With 96 per cent of polls reporting in Florida the former Massachusetts governor reeled in 47 per cent of the votes, while Gingrich was far behind at 32 per cent.
In a succinct speech to the jubilant Tampa crowd, Romney thanked Floridians, praised his “able” competitors and vowed to unite Republicans to defeat Obama in November’s presidential elections.
The Democrats, Romney told the crowd, “like to comfort themselves that a competitive campaign will leave us divided and weak.”
“A competitive campaign doesn’t divide us, it prepares us, and we will win,” he vowed.
Romney also cited Obama’s statement three years ago predicting he would be a one-term president if he wasn’t able to turn the economy around. “And we’re here to collect,” he said, a sound bite he has used several times during the campaign.
Shortly after Romney left the Tampa stage, a defiant Gingrich extinguished any Republican hope for a quick resolution to the nomination contest by telling supporters he still has “46 states to go.”
Gingrich insists he’ll be nominee
With the bitterly fought contest in Florida settled after weeks of personal attacks and a wave of negative advertising saturating the state’s airwaves, all eyes and ears turned to the second-place finisher Gingrich, who offered no congratulations to Romney on Tuesday night and insisted he himself would be the nominee.
“It is now clear that will be a two-person between the conservative leader Newt Gingrich and the Massachusetts moderate,” Gingrich told supporters in Orlando, in an attempt to stoke lingering concerns among some of the party’s right wing that Romney was not a legitimate conservative.
Gingrich, who has railed in recent weeks against the pro-Romney Republican establishment and the “elite” media, said he was certain he would win because he is running a “people’s campaign, not an establishment campaign [and] not a Wall Street campaign.”
