By Maggie Astor: Subscribe to Maggie's RSS feed
January 21, 2012 7:27 PM EST
Last update: 11:58 p.m.
Newt Gingrich won the South Carolina primary by a 12-point margin on Saturday, denying Mitt Romney a quick coronation and reviving his own campaign in remarkable fashion after underperforming in Iowa and New Hampshire.
With 99 percent of precincts reporting, Gingrich had 40.4 percent of the vote to Romney's 27.9 percent. Rick Santorum was in third place with 17 percent, and Ron Paul was in fourth place with 13 percent.
With his upset victory in Saturday's "first in the South" primary, coupled with Santorum's comparatively poor showing, Gingrich has established himself as the conservative challenger to Romney in a race in which conservative and evangelical support had been divided among several candidates. Rick Perry's withdrawal from the race on Thursday, just two days before the primary, cleared the way for a runoff between Gingrich and Santorum, and it seems conservative voters have finally put aside their squabbles enough to coalesce around Gingrich.
The first two contests whittled an eight-candidate field down to four candidates. If Santorum takes the hint voters gave him today and withdraws from the race, South Carolina will have whittled four down to three: Gingrich, Romney, and Paul.
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One of them will face President Barack Obama in November. Which one will it be? And how much closer do the South Carolina results put us toward answering that question?
A Two-Man Race?
"A victory for Gingrich would be a game-changer," Matthew Wilson, a political scientist at Southern Methodist University, said on Friday. "It doesn't mean he would necessarily end up with the nomination, but it means the contest would not be winding down anytime soon."
Gingrich's victory does just that: It changes the game. It does not make Gingrich the front-runner, but it does scuttle the easy coronation many people expected for Romney.
Gingrich predicted this month that if he won South Carolina, he would win the nomination, and he will surely point out in the coming days that the winner of the South Carolina primary has gone on to get the Republican nomination in every election since 1980. But there is no guarantee he will continue that trend.
"It's one of those historical patterns that remains true until it's not true," said Costas Panagopoulos, a political scientist at Fordham University in New York.
In reality, no single contest can predict the eventual nominee. To win the nomination, Gingrich will have to sustain his momentum from South Carolina for several more weeks. This poses a challenge for two reasons: one, his support has been more volatile than steady so far, and two, he trails Romney and Paul in terms of campaign resources, both financial and organizational.
Gingrich is "the big story," Wilson said, "because he seems to have really resuscitated himself, particularly on the strength of his debate performances. [But] can he parlay his success in South Carolina into a real boost in Florida?"
That will be difficult -- certainly not impossible, but difficult. Romney has built a lead in Florida almost as big as the one he held in New Hampshire, and while Gingrich will undoubtedly get a boost in the polls after today's victory, it would take a surge of extraordinary proportions for him to make up a 20-point deficit in 10 days in a state that is much less conservative than South Carolina.
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