The decline and fall of Newt Gingrich

A couple of days ago, Newt Gingrich’s campaign for the US presidency imploded when the leaders of his campaign team quit en masse. The exodus — which included his campaign manager, spokesman and senior strategists — came after an awful month for Gingrich, and looks like it might seal the fate of his already flagging campaign.

Just a month ago, when the former Speaker of the House officially declared that he was seeking the Republican nomination, his fundamentals looked fairly strong. He has very high name recognition (a result of the four years he spent leading the Republicans in Congress in the late 1990s) and was polling fairly well. One major poll just before his announcement found him running a close second to Mitt Romney on 20 per cent of the vote, rising to 26 with Palin excluded. He also had similar favourability ratings to frontrunner Romney: 54 per cent of Republicans had a positive opinion of him, while just 30 per cent had a negative one.