Romney could take no chances: Conservatives were desperate for an alternative to him, and Perry’s story—the “Texas miracle” of his state creating nearly half of all new jobs in the United States since 20091—was deeply compelling. So intimidating was Perry’s late entry into the race that Romney and the other Republicans ganged up to kneecap him on immigration, specifically the governor’s granting of in-state tuition to illegal immigrant students. For Romney, immigration was the only card to play, and he played it ruthlessly, just as he had in 2008.
“Sometimes you have to light a prairie fire to win,” recalls Zac Moffatt, Romney’s digital guru. “But sometimes it comes back and burns your house down.”
In one particularly tense debate, after Perry’s rivals took turns lacerating him over offering the in-state tuition to undocumented minors, he told them, “I don’t think you have a heart.” The audience booed him, then cheered Santorum for calling Perry “soft” on immigration. It was the second-most surreal moment in the primary season, topped only by the time every candidate onstage affirmed that he or she would reject a deficit-reduction deal that proposed ten dollars in spending cuts for every dollar in additional tax revenues, an absurdly absolutist stance given that such an agreement would balance the budget at warp speed without raising taxes on any non-multimillionaires.
One by one, Perry and the others were voted off the island. By the time the Republican primary moved past Iowa and New Hampshire, to the third nominating contest in South Carolina, just four candidates remained: Romney, Gingrich, Santorum, and Ron Paul.
Of this group, Gingrich was in the worst shape. He had finished a distant fourth in Iowa, taking 13 percent of the vote, while Romney, Paul, and Santorum had all finished north of 20 percent. (Santorum technically won, though Romney was announced the winner on caucus night, robbing the underdog of a major momentum boost.) Gingrich had also been blown out in New Hampshire, taking just 9 percent of the vote compared to Romney’s 39 percent.
In the modern primary system, a candidate typically needed a strong showing in one of the first two contests to raise the requisite money for his or her campaign to continue into South Carolina. But Citizens United had transformed the landscape. One donor could now single-handedly sustain a candidate with millions of dollars in super PAC spending, and Gingrich had the sweetest sugar daddy of them all: Sheldon Adelson, the Las Vegas casino magnate, whose total pro-Gingrich expenditures for the cycle would reach $20 million.2
All that money wasn’t doing Gingrich any good. His candidacy was on life support, and polls showed Romney up double digits in South Carolina. Gingrich was stumped. He had exhausted every tactic imaginable: staying positive and playing nice with his rivals; eviscerating Obama, even going so far as to call him the “food-stamp president”; and eventually, going nuclear on Romney in response to sustained attacks from the front-runner’s camp, alleging that his company, Bain Capital, consisted of “rich people figuring out clever legal ways to loot a company.” None of it had vaulted Gingrich into contention. And time was running out.
The two debates in South Carolina offered final gasps of oxygen before the state’s January 21 primary. The first forum, hosted by Fox News in Myrtle Beach, got off to a lousy start, as Gingrich stumbled in response to questions about abandoning his positive-campaigning pledge. And then it happened: Juan Williams, the African American moderator, started grilling Gingrich about his recent racially tinged comments, including the “food stamp president” quip. As the crowd hissed at Williams, Gingrich scolded him with a lecture on political correctness that elicited a standing ovation.
It was an uncomfortable snapshot for some in the party: an overwhelmingly white audience booing a black moderator on Martin Luther King Jr. Day, in a state where the Confederate flag still flew on the Capitol grounds. But for Gingrich it was a moment of clarity. Where all his calculated strategies had failed, his off-the-cuff reprimand of Williams had succeeded. Perhaps attacking Romney—or even the president, for that matter—was a waste of time. Maybe there was a greater upside in doing what came naturally to him: tormenting the fourth estate.
“The thing that struck me,” Gingrich recalls, “was what conservative audiences reacted to, even more than attacks on Obama, was attacks on the media. You could get a stronger response by taking the media head-on than you could with any other single topic.”
Sure enough, three nights later, in North Charleston, Gingrich stole the show with a similar routine. It was all too easy: CNN reporter John King opened the debate with a question about Gingrich’s ex-wife’s recent claim that he had sought an open marriage. It was like putting a beachball on a tee in front of Babe Ruth. Summoning every fiber of moral outrage, Gingrich tore into King, CNN, and the entire press corps. In a rant heard ’round South Carolina, Gingrich bellowed, “I am tired of the elite media protecting Barack Obama by attacking Republicans!”
“It was an electric moment,” recalls Kevin Madden, Romney’s longtime senior adviser and communications specialist. “Literally overnight, Newt’s favorables and unfavorables flipped in our tracking. We went into those debates ten points up and came out fifteen points down.”
Republicans have a rich history of shunning the press. Dwight D. Eisenhower, after leaving office, ripped the “sensation-seeking columnists and commentators” at Barry Goldwater’s 1964 convention, saying they “couldn’t care less about the good of our party.” Vice President Spiro Agnew ratcheted up the rhetoric on behalf of Richard Nixon, giving his famed 1969 speech in Des Moines decrying the “small and unelected elite” who possess a “profound influence over public opinion” without any checks on their “vast power.” And, in a less conspicuous fashion, Reagan warred with the White House press corps for most his time in Washington.
Much of this amounted to “working the refs,” as a basketball coach does after a tough foul call, in the hope of avoiding the next whistle. There was an age in which the refs were perceived to be impartial: As of 1986, Gallup found that 65 percent of Americans still felt a “great deal” or a “fair amount” of confidence in the press.3 But over the ensuing three decades, as voters came to view the refs as players looking to dunk on their team, that number plummeted: By the time Trump was elected president, it was 32 percent, and just 14 percent among Republicans.4
“Taking on the media, instigating that clash of political civilizations, became Newt’s message,” Madden says. “I always believed that media bias is a fact, not a message. I don’t believe that anymore.”
Gingrich won South Carolina in a rout, taking 40 percent of the vote to Romney’s 28 percent, a result that would have been unimaginable a week earlier. By using the media as a foil, Gingrich had rallied the conservative base, shattered the establishment’s infallibility, and reset the narrative of the campaign. He had also created a blueprint.
That spring, Andrew Breitbart, the combative blogger whose website was gaining cult popularity among the anti-establishment right, died suddenly at age forty-three. This news shook the conservative movement: Breitbart had been pioneering with his vision of an alternative to what he viewed as a biased mainstream media. Upon his death, the leadership of Breitbart’s burgeoning empire was assumed by a little-known investment banker with nationalist views and a disdain for the GOP elite. His name was Steve Bannon.