Santorum wasn’t competing in Florida, so to claim that Santorum was “crushed” by Newt in Florida, you also have to acknowledge that Gingrich was just crushed by Santorum in 5 straight races, including Michigan.
Plus, Michigan is only seen as a collapsing failure because PPP, a democratic outfit, through up a poll that said Santorum was leading by 15% in Michigan, when their previous poll and subsequent poll both showed much different results.
If not for that “Santorum is way ahead” meme pushed by PPP and I think one other poll, we’d have seen Michigan for what it was, a close race where Romney had great advantages, including a LOT of early voting, and where Santorum managed to come within 5%, and to take about half the delegates, essentially splitting the state.
Gingrich of course already had 2 bites at the apple, collapsing in December and again after South Carolina.
And in an interesting twist, in the states where GIngrich came in 2nd, the combined Gingrich/Santorum vote never seems to have beaten the Romney vote. Whereas, in the states where Santorum came in 2nd, the only state where their combined total didn’t beat Romney was Arizona. And neither Santorum nor Gingrich were really competing in Arizona. So, in addition to Newt beating Romney 1 time, and Rick beating Romney 4 times, in Michigan Newt/Santorum beat Romney.
Three states where Newt beat Rick but didn’t win:
New Hampshire: Romney 97K, Newt/Rick 47K
Florida: Romney 775K, Newt/Rick 756K
Nevada: Romney 16K, Newt/Rick 10K
Two states where Rick beat Newt but didn’t win:
Michigan: Romney 411K, Rick/Newt: 443K
Arizona: Romney 217K, Rick/Newt: 196K
And the only state where Romney broke 50% was a state where Newt came in 2nd place.
Of course, the “electorate” isn’t doing analysis. They will move partly based on what the news media says this week. But I doubt the news media is going to play the “Newt Resurgence” story again. And if they don’t, it will be interesting to see if Newt has enough money to get that message out himself.
So far, he seems to be concentrating on 2 states, one of which he was always expected to win (his home state, Georgia), and another (Tennessee) where if he didn’t win, Santorum would win, so his efforts aren’t doing anything to stop Romney.
With due respect, there are so many false dot connections and convenient over looks in your analysis that it’s not worth responding to point by point.