Word: florida
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...answer may well come further south, in Florida, when the state holds its primary on Jan. 29 and the race for the nomination will essentially be reset. "McCain comes into this thing with momentum, but so does Mitt Romney," says unaligned Republican pollster Neil Newhouse. (Romney won Saturday's largely uncontested Nevada caucus.) "And Rudy Giuliani is waiting down there with a welcome sign. It's the only state where all four of the leading candidates have a shot to win this thing...
Polls show the Florida race split almost evenly among the three candidates who have won a major primary or caucus and Giuliani, whose campaign strategy was prefaced on ignoring the early states and betting big on Florida. "It's a microcosm of the nation in many ways," says Newhouse. "It's southern, with an extensive northern population. There's a substantial population of establishment Republicans, a substantial population of evangelical Republicans. If [a candidate] can win Florida, they can probably win the nomination...
...Florida, McCain will have to defend his precarious frontrunner standing on several fronts. He must argue that despite his decades in Washington, he is an agent of change. He must convince voters increasingly worried about the economy that Romney's private sector success is not as important as his record of government experience. (And Fred Thompson may not hang in long enough to be spoiler among conservative Florida Republicans.) Even more dramatically, McCain must make the case to moderates and independents that he, not Giuliani, best represents their interests. "My guess is that we'll split the moderates with Giuliani...
Huckabee has been counted out before only to bounce back and surprise skeptics, and Saltsman points out that after Florida - which votes on Jan. 29 and where polls show Huckabee in a four-way dead heat - the campaign expects to do well in a number of the mostly Southern states that vote on February 5th, namely Georgia, Alabama, Arkansas, Oklahoma, Missouri, and Tennessee...
...Besides a lack of energy, Thompson was plagued by tactical missteps out of the gate. He had to defend his stance on abortion after the Los Angeles Times reported that, during his time as a lobbyist, he'd done work for a pro-choice group. During a stop in Florida his seeming ignorance over a controversial proposal to allow oil and gas exploration in the Everglades earned him criticism. And while the rest of the G.O.P. field ran on a platform of 'I'll keep you safe, I'll cut your taxes and I'll overturn Roe v. Wade' (rotate...