For Herman Cain, last week was a mini reenactment of the en masse resignations that have crippled Newt Gingrich’s campaign: his New Hampshire director Matt Murphy, his Iowa director Tina Goff, his straw poll coordinator Kevin Hall, and regional director Jim Zeiler all resigned.
Cain has brushed off the resignations, with his campaign announcing he intends to hire replacements. But one of the tensions might be Cain’s determination to run a nationally-oriented campaign, not one that focuses exclusively on the crucial early primary states.
“What I have found is that some of our staffers [is] they’re very enthusiastic about that state and they would want me to live there,” Cain told National Review Online in an interview last week.
But while Cain is keeping a close eye on the early primary states, he doesn’t want to ignore the rest of the nation.
“When they do national polls they don’t just call the primary states,” Cain remarked. “They call people all over the country.”
That’s why Cain is going to plenty of states besides Iowa and New Hampshire. On Fourth of July, for instance, while Michele Bachmann and Newt Gingrich campaigned in Iowa and Mitt Romney and Jon Huntsman in New Hampshire, Cain spoke at a tea party event in Philadelphia. He’s not ignoring either Iowa or New Hampshire — he’s visited those states 21 and 14 times respectively since the beginning of the year — but he’s insisting on national focus, speaking about future visits to states such as Nevada and Washington.