Romney fights to secure New Hampshire as Gingrich surges

With Newt Gingrich slashing into his lead in national polls, Mitt Romney returned to New Hampshire on Saturday to defend his front-runner position in a state he has counted on as his slingshot to the Republican presidential nomination.

In a show of force intended to illustrate his campaign’s sophistication less than six weeks before the Jan. 10 primary, the Romney team marshaled hundreds of volunteers in the parking lot of a Manchester diner Saturday morning for a rally before they set out to knock on 5,000 doors.

“This is a campaign about earning it,” Romney told reporters, testing out his campaign’s new slogan after speaking to supporters from the flatbed of a Dodge Ram truck.

To demonstrate that he is taking nothing for granted, Romney spent part of the morning walking door to door on Manchester’s well-groomed Chestnut Street. “You’re always in this neighborhood!” a man shouted from a window as the candidate passed. Romney also engaged in a rare exchange with reporters, reminiscing about his experience as a Mormon missionary in France. “That was knocking on thousands and thousands of doors without much success,” he said.

After striking out at three houses, the former Massachusetts governor found a supporter at the fourth and soon emerged from the man’s basement bearing a yard sign from his 2008 run, which he muscled into the lawn himself. He chatted with a young family nearby about the concrete siding that they were installing at their house (“Isn’t that something? That’s pretty cool.”). Up the street, he tossed a baseball to 3-year-old Charlie Skouteris, the son of a former staffer, who told Romney — while swinging a yellow plastic bat — that he planned to vote in the primary.

Asked about the threat posed by Gingrich, Romney said he hoped voters would examine the former House speaker’s long tenure in Washington, noting that by contrast he had run two businesses, the state of Massachusetts and the 2002 Winter Olympics in Salt Lake City. “I think people who have had that experience in leading and guiding enterprises and changing them in dramatic ways, [that’s] the kind of leadership that people in America are looking for,” he said.

Romney’s commanding lead in New Hampshire has made for a far quieter primary season in the state this year that in the past. With the exception of former Utah Gov. Jon Huntsman Jr., who held his 113th event in New Hampshire on Thursday, and former Sen. Rick Santorum of Pennsylvania, Romney’s strength has steered many of the GOP candidates toward other early states.

But interviews with New Hampshire voters suggest that Romney still has considerable work to do. The softness of his support was evident in the most recent WMUR Granite State poll, in which only 16% of likely Republican voters said they were firmly committed to a candidate.

Gingrich’s sudden rise nationally has intrigued former Romney backers like Randy Pittman of New Ipswich, who said Gingrich appeared to be a stronger challenger for President Obama this time.

“The country has progressed since the last time [Romney] ran, and he’s running on the same platform,” he said. Pittman’s wife, Ginnie, said she was eyeing Huntsman and Gingrich because they seemed more authentic than Romney.

Still, Gingrich faces organizational hurdles. His campaign’s state director, 29-year-old tea party activist Andrew Hemingway, has never run a campaign in New Hampshire. The campaign, he said, is relying on a “digital strategy that includes a lot of emails” and is trying to contact 1,000 voters a day with the help of volunteers.

“We’re literally going from zero to 60 as fast as we possibly can,” Hemingway said.

Romney operatives say they have contacted more than 300,000 voters since June — identifying their supporters, recruiting volunteers and keeping tabs on undecided voters.

Backing up what neutral political operatives say is an unrivaled ground game, Romney has purchased more than $220,000 of airtime in the last two weeks on WMUR, the state’s largest television station.

After Gingrich won the backing of the New Hampshire Union Leader newspaper last week, some suggested that he could have a late-breaking rise similar to that of Sen. John McCain of Arizona, who won the state’s Republican primary in 2008 after his campaign — much like Gingrich’s this year — had been written off. But McCain had long-standing support in New Hampshire that Gingrich lacks.

Romney advisor Tom Rath dismissed predictions of a Gingrich tsunami but said the campaign was prepared to engage it if it came. “In every race, there’s always an externality that occurs, or a bump, and you’ve got to be prepared to weather it,” he said. “I think we are.”

maeve.reston@latimes.com