This morning’s New York Times piece on Rudy Giuliani’s courtship of snowbirds in Florida perpetuates a myth common in much of the coverage of the GOP race in Florida:

…Mr. Giuliani chose an unorthodox campaign strategy. He essentially skipped four early party caucuses and primaries. Iowa and South Carolina were seen as too loaded with Christian evangelicals, and New Hampshire was too friendly to Mitt Romney (or John McCain, as the case was). Nevada, too, seemed like Romney country.

So Mr. Giuliani repaired to Florida and declared it his sunshine fortress, counting on lost tribes of New York snowbirds to rally to his banner. He rolled into more towns here than an itinerant insurance salesman. He talked hurricanes, Everglades, military bases, disaster insurance, talked pretty much anything on the mind of a Floridian.

The latter is true, but the former is fiction.  In Iowa, under the radar, Giuliani probably spent more than Huckabee and McCain combined.  In New Hampshire, Giuliani held more events than every other candidate except Mitt Romney (including Sens. Clinton and Obama) and spent three million dollars in radio and TV advertising, with more on TV ads than anyone except for Romney and Sen. John McCain.  And much of this was as late as October 2007, when Camp Rudy was expressly denying they had a February 5th strategy.  By November 2007, Giuliani had spent roughly five million dollars in radio ads and direct mail in Iowa and New Hampshire.  Fortress Florida was not a “chosen” strategy; it was what was left to Rudy when his efforts in the early states fizzled out.

Yesterday at TIME magazine, Michael Scherer also got off to a bad start with the claim that “Giuliani has run the most strategically farsighted campaign in the Republican field.”  Scherer, however, manages to identify Giuliani’s remaining hope of winning Florida and remaining in the race for the GOP nomination:

(F)or months the Giuliani campaign has been banking on a little-noticed advantage it has built among the orange groves and shuffleboard courts–a grass-roots army of over 6,000 volunteers who have been making more than a million phone calls to get Giuliani supporters to vote early. If historical trends hold, roughly one-third of the Republican votes in Florida will be cast before Election Day, either by absentee ballot or by “early voting” at polling places set up across the state.

Scherer then gives examples of Giuliani’s early voting rallies, so I will stick to the forest.  Today’s St. Petersburg Times reports that 325,161 Republicans had cast early or absentee votes as of Thursday.  That is roughly three percent of Florida’s registered voters.  Overall turnout for the primaries in 2000 and 2004 was roughly 20%, though many expect it to be higher this year, due to the competitive GOP race and a statewide referendum on a proposed state constitutional amendment to cut property taxes.  But once you account for GOP turnout instead of total turnout, that 325,161 starts looking a lot larger.

Of course, the share of those early and absentee votes captured by Giuliani is not known.  But as Scherer reported for TIME:

The only GOP candidate with a comparable ground operation in Florida is Mitt Romney, who also boasts campaign offices and thousands of volunteers across the state. The smaller-dollar campaigns of Mike Huckabee and John McCain are only just now beginning to fly in staff and open offices. If the race remains close, experts say, the early-voting push mastered by Giuliani could prove decisive. “If you have a good organization and you have a multicandidate field,” says political scientist Darryl Paulson of the University of South Florida, “it could clearly be the margin of difference in the campaign.”

In addition to those volunteers, Romney reportedly has two dozen staffers, aired months of television advertising and made 22 campaign visits, second only to Giuliani.  He also enlisted many of former Gov. Jeb Bush’s allies, who should know the lay of the swamp.

In contrast, as previously noted, McCain had organizational and problems in Florida following his summer slump, while Huckabee is not fully committed to fighting it out in a close, winner-take-all contest. 

Whatever momentum McCain got from winning in South Carolina will help the Maverick, as will the issue mix.  The Sunshine State’s sizeable Hispanic vote (and the Cuban flavor thereof) shifts the discussion more toward national security and the economy over illegal immigration.  McCain is also hoping for the sort of support from veterans in South Carolina.  The state is home to an estimated 1.7 million veterans, second only to California.

RCP’s Jay Cost, looking at Florida and beyond, suggests that Florida may not alter the dynamics of the GOP race in a significant way.  But based on Cost’s analysis (which I recommend, per usual) I would hypothesize if Giuliani wins (or comes thisclose) in Florida, Super-Duper Tuesday becomes much more complicated for McCain, as both he and Giuliani would likely be competing for the same cheap delegates in the Blue states, while Romney works the Red states.  And if Giuliani is able to hang in, it will be because his organization in Florida banked early and absentee votes before his poll numbers started shrinking.  Romney might win on the strength of his organizaion, but if he knocks Giuliani out, he might end up keeping McCain in the race past Super-Duper Tuesday.

Update:  At NRO, Byron York has a piece on the decline of the Giuliani campaign in which — to his credit — campaign manager Mike DuHaime admits that the campaign did invest in those early states.