Gingrich Coalition Could Pose Sustained Challenge to Romney

"I think this is the point where the Republican Party has said, 'I'm a born again Christian conservative [or tea party activist] and Newt's my guy' and the rest of the party says Romney is my guy, and they get to duke that out," said Rich Galen, a former Gingrich adviser.

At the core of Gingrich's big win were dominant performances among the groups that have been the most skeptical of Romney in polls throughout the past year-particularly evangelical Christians, strong supporters of the tea party, voters without a college education, and those who consider themselves very conservative. An immediate challenge for Gingrich is that each of those groups is less prevalent in Florida, the next state on the calendar, than they were in South Carolina.

But over the long run, if Gingrich can solidify support among those groups, exit polls from 2008 and other recent surveys suggest that coalition represents about half the party or slightly more -- a big enough base to sustain a lasting challenge to Romney.

In South Carolina, Gingrich ran up big numbers among all the components of what might be called the GOP's populist wing. The exit polls showed he captured 47 percent of voters who consider themselves very conservative; an equal 47 percent of strong tea party supporters; 44 percent of evangelical Christians; 42 percent of those without college educations; and 40 percent of those earning less than $50,000 annually.

Romney actually attracted about the same level of support among those groups in South Carolina as he did in Iowa, or even slightly more. For instance, Romney won 21 percent of South Carolina evangelical Christians, compared to 14 percent of them in Iowa; 19 percent of very conservative voters in the Palmetto state, compared to 14 percent in Iowa, and 24 percent of non-college South Carolina voters, compared to 22 percent in Iowa.

That consistency, in a smaller field, underscores the difficulty Romney faces in expanding his beachheads among those groups. The ominous trend for Romney is that with fewer conservative choices to fragment those voters, Gingrich was able to unify them to a much greater extent than anyone did in Iowa. "Conservatives are rejecting the Washington consensus that Mitt Romney should be the nominee," Erick Erickson, the publisher of the influential conservative website Redstate.com, said on CNN Saturday night.

What makes Gingrich's performance with the populist wing even more impressive is that it came despite a respectable, if distant, showing for Rick Santorum among the same groups. Santorum attracted between roughly one-fifth and one-fourth of evangelical, very conservative, and non-college voters. That wasn't enough to make him competitive, but it suppressed what could have been an even more impressive performance for Gingrich.

Steve Schmidt, the 2008 campaign manager for John McCain, said that Romney now faces a " reasonably high risk" that conservatives will consistently coalesce around Gingrich in other states. Compounding that threat, Schmidt said, was the stunning South Carolina exit poll finding that voters who said their top concern was electability preferred Gingrich over Romney by double digits. "The most important thing that happened is the movement on that number in the exit poll, because that is the fuel of Mitt Romney's campaign," Schmidt said.

Romney wobbled but held his own much more successfully among what could be called the party's managerial wing: more upscale, secular, and pragmatic voters. Those voters have been his strongest supporters, not only in Iowa and New Hampshire but almost all national polls.

Romney edged Gingrich among both the one-third of the vote that described itself as moderate or liberal, and the one-third that did not identify as evangelical Christians. Romney ran only slightly behind Gingrich among those with college-degrees, those earning over $100,000 annually and those who were neutral or hostile to the tea party. That wasn't as strong as Romney's performance among those groups in Iowa and New Hampshire, but his ability to remain competitive there after a grueling week in South Carolina focused on his tax returns may signal his capacity to recapture that vote as the race progresses.

The best near-term news for Romney is that Florida tilts less than South Carolina toward the groups that have resisted him. In 2008, according to exit polls, evangelical Christians cast only about two-fifths of the Florida Republican primary vote-compared to almost two-thirds in South Carolina on Saturday (an even higher percentage than in 2008). Likewise, very conservative voters cast only 27 percent of the 2008 Florida ballots, compared to 36 percent in South Carolina on Saturday. (Gingrich beat Romney among those voters by nearly 30 percentage points in South Carolina.) And the 2008 Florida GOP electorate split exactly half in half between college and non-college voters, while the South Carolina vote tilted slightly toward non-college voters who gave Gingrich a nearly 20 point edge over Romney.

Romney's financial and organizational advantages remain as significant after South Carolina as before. "Every eventual nominee went through one period when it looked like they could lose," said Whit Ayres, a GOP pollster who is unaffiliated in the race. Erickson says conservatives are already bracing for establishment money to try to prop up Santorum, in the hope of dividing the activist conservative vote and easing Romney's path.

But what South Carolina suggests is that Gingrich's fierce and vitriolic tone toward President Obama, the news media, and "elites in New York and Washington" -- which he unfurled at full mast in his victory speech on Saturday night -- is closer to the emotional heart of the GOP now than Romney's board-room demeanor. "Gingrich certainly is effective in capturing a tone and tenor that really resonates with a great deal of Republicans out there, and Romney just has a harder time doing it," said Schmidt. "To the extent Gingrich is able to close this electability gap and open up a communications gap, that is a very problematic situation for Romney."

Through the primaries, Romney has always tried to run with one-eye on the general election, calibrating his tone and agenda partly toward suburban swing voters who might recoil from the intensity of Gingrich's jeremiad Saturday night. But Romney's inability to connect more viscerally with his party's rising populist wing has suddenly, and unexpectedly, raised at least the possibility that he will never get to worry about communicating with swing voters as the GOP's nominee next fall.