US Elections:The hotly contested primary contest in the Sunshine State will be pivotal in determining who the Republicans will send into the presidential race in November, writes Dan Balzin Columbia, South Carolina.
Riding the momentum from his victory in South Carolina, John McCain has turned his attention to Florida and the high-stakes primary there that will test whether he can consolidate support among Republican voters and take control of the party's nomination battle.
The January 29th contest in Florida will be the first Republican primary closed to independent voters, who have provided McCain with his margins of victory in both New Hampshire and South Carolina.
A victory there, strategists agree, would stamp McCain as the front-runner in what has been a muddied Republican race, and give him a clear advantage heading towards Super Tuesday on February 5th.
Leaving South Carolina on Sunday, McCain at first seemed hesitant to adopt the mantle of Republican leader. "I don't know how to define a front-runner," he told reporters asking him if he believed he was now the candidate to beat in the Republican race.
Minutes later, he changed his mind. Asked about critical comments from former New York mayor Rudy Giuliani, McCain shot back with a grin: "When someone hasn't run a primary, I can understand why they would attack the front-runner."
Florida has played a pivotal role in the past two general elections and is now poised to help determine who the Republicans will send into the main event in November.
Former Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney, who has won Nevada's caucuses and the Michigan primary in the past week, sees the state as a potential breakthrough for his once-battered candidacy and is pouring in more of his personal fortune in an effort to deny McCain a victory.
Former Arkansas governor Mike Huckabee, after losing to McCain in South Carolina, looks to Florida as perhaps a last opportunity to show that his Iowa caucus victory at the start of the nominating season was not a fluke.
But what most distinguishes Florida from the contests in Iowa, New Hampshire, Michigan and South Carolina is the presence of Rudy Giuliani as a full-fledged participant. Giuliani has been in Florida for several weeks and has made the primary the critical test for his candidacy.
There was considerable speculation that former senator Fred Thompson would quit the race if he did not do well in South Carolina, but on Sunday aides said no decision had been made.
Florida offers a large and complex battleground for the Republican candidates. A full complement of television advertisements would run to at least $3 million (€2.08 million) between now and the primary, perhaps more, according to strategists. No candidate, not even the wealthy Romney, will be able to spend so freely.
Romney has ordered up about $1 million in TV commercials, and an adviser said more might be bought depending on the state of the race. McCain's campaign has promised to counter with a seven-figure buy of his own. The Giuliani campaign expects to be competitive with McCain on television but not with Romney. Huckabee's hand-to-mouth campaign will struggle to stay abreast of the others.
Geographically, Florida is a series of mini-nations. Giuliani hopes to capitalise on retirees from the northeast who live in south Florida. Huckabee will look to the Florida Panhandle for the votes of religious and social conservatives, but McCain sees significant potential support there as well because of the concentration of military veterans. The main battleground is likely to be the corridor between Tampa-St Petersburg and Orlando, which all candidates will be working over the next nine days.
Florida will award 57 delegates on a winner-takes-all basis next week, the most of any state to date. The Republican national committee penalised the state because officials moved up the date of the primary, cutting its delegate slate in half. But by the time of the national convention this summer, it is possible that all 114 delegates will be awarded to the winner.
Recent polls have shown McCain with a slender lead over Giuliani, followed closely by Romney and Huckabee. But the campaigns expect to reassess the state of play over the next few days as the effects of South Carolina and, to a lesser extent, Nevada are felt in Florida.
McCain has yet to clearly win the Republican vote in any contest this year. In South Carolina, he and Huckabee evenly divided the Republican voters. His margin came from independents, who represented one-fifth of the vote.
The same pattern occurred in New Hampshire, where McCain and Huckabee evenly split Republicans and McCain won by a big margin among independents. In Michigan, Romney decisively won Republicans on his way to victory there.
"We've proven that we can win among Republicans and appeal to conservatives," says Romney spokesman Kevin Madden. "Given that it is a closed primary, John McCain is not going to be able to find refuge in independent voters as he did in New Hampshire and South Carolina."
"We certainly did a lot better than governor Romney did among Republicans in the first contest in the south," McCain strategist Steve Schmidt responds. "We feel good about how senator McCain is performing across all bands of the Republican Party."
McCain advisers see a two-person race against Romney developing in Florida. They believe Giuliani will begin to fade as he has in other states and nationally. But they know the stronger Giuliani's support, the more difficult it will be for McCain to win the state because the two draw from similar pools of voters.
Mike DuHaime, Giuliani's campaign manager, acknowledges the significance of Florida for his candidate. "We've made no secret about the importance of this state," he says. "We've always known this would be the most critical stretch."
But he says he expects the race to remain wide open through February 5th, when 21 states hold Republican contests.
DuHaime also challenged McCain over his dependence on independent voters, saying: "John McCain hasn't won a primary yet without the help of independent voters, so coming into a closed primary is a complicating factor."
He says differences between Giuliani and McCain on president George Bush's tax cuts, immigration and campaign finance reform would shape the debate between his candidate and the Arizona senator.
Speaking on ABC's This Week programme on Sunday, Giuliani sounded one of those themes in challenging McCain's credentials as an economic conservative.
"I am the strongest fiscal conservative in the race, and I have a record of supporting tax cuts," he said. "John [ McCain] voted against the Bush tax cuts, I think on both occasions, and sided with the Democrats."
McCain responded that he was supporting Republican tax cuts when the mayor was backing a Democrat for governor of New York - a reference to Giuliani's endorsement of Mario Cuomo over Republican George Pataki in 1994.
Romney, who plans to focus on economic issues, also took aim at McCain on Fox News Sunday, saying he had the experience and business background to fix both the ailing economy and a politically paralysed Washington.
"If people want somebody who has been in Washington all their life and understands Washington's ways and has been part of the Washington scene for a quarter of a century, then John McCain will be their person."
McCain, in an interview with CNN, dismissed questions about the breadth and depth of his support. "I got more votes than anybody else, and it says that I got it from across the spectrum from all over the state," he said.
- (LA Times-Washington Post service)