Florida primary preview: Storm clouds, not sunshine, await Mitt Romney

After suffering a big loss in South Carolina, former Republican front-runner Mitt Romney faces a tough road in Florida, where the January 31 primary gives him perhaps his last, best chance to slow Newt Gingrich down.

Democrats are gleefully awaiting the Romney-Gingrich slugfest, with Democratic National Committee Chair Debbie Wasserman Schultz hosting a Sunday conference call "welcoming" the battered Romney campaign to Florida, and state Democratic Party Executive Director Scott Arceneaux issuing a weekend statement pouring salt in Romney's wounds, saying that after Saturday's "embarrassing loss in South Carolina and on the heels of losing the Iowa Caucuses, Mitt Romney enters the Sunshine State with the cloud over his campaign growing larger and on the wrong side of the expectations game."

And while Romney continues to lead most Florida polls (for now at least) he's in the hot seat in next week's primary, which not long ago was seen as his likely coronation as the Republican presidential nominee. Now, Florida promises to be a brutal, high stakes showdown between the wounded Romney, and the surging Gingrich.

Here are the ten biggest factors that could swing the sunshine state.

1. Early and absentee voting

Ballots are already being cast in Florida, with early voting kicking off on Saturday in 62 of the state's 67 counties. Polls opened a week ago in five counties where a new voting law that cut the early vote period from 14 to 9 days did not go into effect because those counties are covered by the Voting Rights Act and federal pre-clearance is required.

When the nearly 12,000 early votes from those five counties are added to the absentee ballots already turned in as of Sunday, some 225,000 votes are already in the can -- more than 10 percent of the expected final tally. That could marginally help Romney, since many of those votes were banked before his recent debate stumbles and his loss in South Carolina. And Romney's well oiled campaign has had the money and infrastructure to run an efficient campaign to bring in absentee ballots, which are typically the GOP's not-so secret weapon in Florida elections. Now that he has won South Carolina, which historically has meant becoming the eventual nominee, Gingrich will have the cash to play the turnout game too, but he hasn't had time to build the ground operation Romney has. Advantage: Romney.

2. Independents on the sidelines

Florida has a large cache of independents, who make up nearly in four registered voters (versus about 36 percent Republicans and 40 percent Democrats.) But they can't vote in the state's closed primary, as indies could in Iowa, New Hampshire and South Carolina. That means that for the first time, Romney has to play to a purely Republican audience, roughly two-thirds of whom identify themselves as conservative or very conservative. And while Gingrich's record is as full of flip flops on core conservative issues like climate change, immigration and the individual health insurance mandate as Romney's, South Carolina shows that he speaks to conservatives more convincingly than Romney does. Advantage: Gingrich.

3. Rick Scott

Florida's deeply unpopular governor could wind up being an anvil around the necks of all the GOP contenders as they head to the state. Rick Scott barely won election in 2010, and quickly became one of the most unpopular governors in the country (Scott reached his personal best approval rating this month; unfortunately his "best" is 38 percent.) Scott's negative image poses the biggest problem for Romney, who will have to decide whether he wants to even be photographed with a fellow "one percenter" governor whose former company committed record Medicare fraud, and who is even more associated with the cold calculus of vulture capitalism than Romney himself. (More in demand may be Scott's black lieutenant governor, Jennifer Carroll.)

Democrats have made it clear they plan to drive home the connection between Scott's corporate background and Romney's days at Bain Capital, and both the state and national parties, and their allies have been hitting that theme hard, with Arceneaux accusing Romney of being "like Florida's unpopular Governor Rick Scott when it comes to corporate greed and shady business practices." Advantage: Gingrich.