Obama rallies voters for Fetterman, pushes them to consider: ‘Who will fight for you?’
As the man the national media calls the “anti-politician” and the “anti-Christ,” Newt Gingrich is finally campaigning for a U.S. Senate seat in his adopted home state, Arizona.
“This is a very good choice for the voters of Arizona,” Gingrich said as he drove his campaign bus and held a news conference in Phoenix.
“I’m going to work for you, to make you secure,” he added. “I mean, who will fight for you?”
Gingrich’s bid to run against Senator Jeff Flake has drawn comparisons not only to President Reagan’s 1980 re-election, but also to John Kerry’s 2004 presidential bid against George W. Bush.
In both cases, the incumbent president carried the state, even though the president himself was a lame duck in 2012.
In other words, both men have built up a national following while riding high in the approval ratings of their state’s electorate.
This time, however, no one is looking to the president.
Gingrich, who has been called the “anti-politician” and the “anti-Christ,” is only able to appear before the voters in the state on Wednesday once a year. That’s when he attends a closed-door fundraiser at his “Gingrich Ranch.”
The candidate is not only the target of much of the scorn that has been hurled at him, but in the state of Arizona, is also not considered a viable choice by the voters.
In 2010, Romney won the state by about 22,000 votes. His margin was roughly 1.5 percent of the total electorate — which in this case are non-partisan voters.
Even if Gingrich wins by an even larger margin, he’ll have trouble crossing the state’s electoral threshold — which is 1 percent of the vote.
“The most difficult electoral map is Arizona,” said University of Southern California political science professor James Zogby, who’s written a book on the state. “Republicans here have been in power for the last three decades. The last four years have been miserable for Republicans there.”
He added: “Gingrich is the anti-politician. The people who know him best are Democrats — they don’t like him, but they don’t
