A Huntsman se le acaba el tiempo

The Weekly Standard:

If Huntsman has any chance to win the GOP nomination for president, he’s going to have to successfully challenge Mitt Romney in New Hampshire.

And that’s what the campaign has been trying to do, with middling success. Romney can boast endorsements from New Hampshire power players like Republican senator Kelly Ayotte, congressman Charlie Bass, former senator (and former governor) Judd Gregg, and former governor John H. Sununu. The Huntsman camp, instead, touts its “advanced grassroots organization.”

“We have 140 grassroots leaders in 90 towns,” says spokesman Tim Miller. It’s a start, but it means the Huntsman campaign has had to make its ground game—what Sununu calls the “see me, touch me, feel me” aspect of politics—a top priority. Miller insists, “We’re going to outwork everybody in the state.”

Huntsman has been working hard. He’s made 12 trips to New Hampshire since the end of September, attending over 122 events. Mark McIntosh, a George W. Bush administration veteran and the campaign’s policy director, speaks positively about the growth of the crowds at these events. “We’re getting way over 100 people” at events across the state, McIntosh says.

But without support from the New Hampshire establishment, and without money (the campaign announced in October it was $1 million in debt), how does Huntsman actually compete against the Romney juggernaut? Huntsman needs to convince New Hampshire Republicans, particularly those moderate conservatives predisposed to vote for Romney, of two things: that a Romney victory on January 10 is not inevitable, and that Huntsman is the competent-conservative alternative to Romney.

To the first point, Huntsman has found an unwitting partner in the most recent anti-Romney candidate, Newt Gingrich. For now, Gingrich sits atop the national polls and is polling second behind Romney in New Hampshire, presenting the former Massachusetts governor with his most significant challenge so far. If voters are giving Gingrich a look in New Hampshire, maybe they’ll consider Huntsman, too.

(...) The second, more difficult task for the Huntsman campaign is making the case for his conservative credentials. For his policy advisers, it’s been a monumental struggle to break the largely self-created perception that Huntsman is a moderate-to-liberal Republican. “I’ve been arguing since summer that this guy’s a hell of a lot more conservative than he’s made out to be,” says McIntosh. “That’s been a bit of a frustration for me.”

(...) So, is Huntsman’s New Hampshire plan working? At the beginning of October, he was stuck in the single digits in the polls, where he remained for most of the next two months. But a new poll from Suffolk University released on December 14 showed Huntsman in third place, with 13 percent support among Republican primary voters, his highest numbers in New Hampshire yet. That’s still 25 points behind Romney, but only 7 behind Gingrich. If Romney underperforms in Iowa and voters decide he isn’t as electable as claimed, maybe they will bolt for Huntsman.

Maybe. The inescapable truth is that there’s a lot of seeing, touching, and feeling left to do, and Huntsman is running out of time. Despite his intense focus on the state over the fall, Huntsman’s name ID there is floating somewhere in the “high sixties, low seventies,” according to Miller. Romney and Gingrich have near-universal recognition.

“Huntsman just hasn’t caught fire,” MacDonald observes. “He came in much later.” Romney was a presence during the 2010 elections, he says, and voters remember that.

The Romney campaign, for its part, doesn’t seem to take a threat from Huntsman seriously. “At some point, the fact that Governor Huntsman is an Obamaite at heart will be part of the mix,” says Sununu. “I don’t think people pay much attention to what Governor Huntsman says.”