Again this week, Giuliani said that he "needs to win" Florida, the biggest state to vote so far and the gateway to the massive wave of Super Tuesday primaries Feb. 5. But the latest polling shows him running third behind Mitt Romney and John McCain, and falling further back as Election Day nears.
It's a pattern that's been repeated in other states, where the more he campaigned, the worse he seemed to do.
He's also suffered from negative publicity, some of it inaccurate, about police protection during his extramarital affair with Judith Nathan, now his third wife, as well as coverage of his friendship with former New York police Commissioner Bernard Kerik, a former business partner now under federal indictment.
But his biggest problem may have been his failure to compete more aggressively in the early states, a plan hatched largely by a tight circle of loyal New York advisers who lacked presidential campaign experience.
His highly publicized strategy of waiting until Florida has bought him time in the wide-open Republican race, but he did make stabs at competing elsewhere.
His half-hearted try in Iowa produced a sixth-place finish, while a much more extensive, and expensive, campaign in New Hampshire wound up barely nudging out Ron Paul for fourth place.
Last weekend, Giuliani received 2 percent of the vote and finished sixth in South Carolina, a state he initially tried to set up as a Southern firewall, opening several campaign offices and visiting more than a dozen times before bailing out in the final weeks before the election.
Falling back on Florida, he's worked hard to build support among expatriates from the Northeast.
"I identify with him, you know?" said Todd Day, 40, a transplanted Yankee who works in the advertising business in Orlando and says he's still undecided.
With campaign funds running short, Giuliani has been forced to divert some of his time from campaigning to fundraising in recent days. He's being outspent on TV by Romney and losing voters concerned about terrorism to McCain.
His inability to become a factor in the early contests has kept him out of the news, which was why campaign veterans said all along that starting late in Florida wouldn't work.
"It's so hard to sit on the sidelines for a month while everybody else is giving victory speeches," said Charles W. "Tre" Evers, a Republican consultant in Orlando.
