Mitt Romney’s campaign is watching as their worst case scenario comes closer and closer to reality.

I can’t remember where I read it, but there was an opinion piece comparing Mitt Romney’s campaign to how his old, slash and burn takeover firm, Bain Capital, used to function. At Bain, Romney understand that in order to take over and loot a company, you didn’t need a majority share, you just needed a controlling share. While sometimes, that was one and the same, often it was not.

For months and months, it appeared that a ‘controlling share’ of the GOP primary could be had for much less than 50% of the vote. In fact, despite hanging around 20-25% nationally among Republican voters, Romney’s consistently had a pretty clear path to the nomination based on consistently getting one vote more than the guy in second place.

Of course, the cornerstone of this strategy was the fractured nature of the field. No one serious ever sufficiently cornered the market on the ‘anyone but Mitt’ vote to pose a challenge requiring Mitt’s team to reassess their primary election strategy.

Mitt’s handlers liked Cain because he was never a serious enough prospect to steal enough votes from Bachmann/Perry/Gingrich (Ron Paul is probably a unique case) to truly corner the anti-Mitt market.

They probably never really thought Gingrich would pick steam like he did. My guess is that they counted on Rick Perry unleashing his war chest to compete with Cain to get that anti-Mitt market for himself. They probably also counted on this not working, which wasn’t a bad bet. It’s a hard road from being a front runner who fell to fourth place back up to first or second. Not mention the fact that Perry’s campaign has consistently failed to seize any moment and there was no reason to expect things to be any different.

Instead, Cain has absolutely imploded (and is apparently talking to his staff about dropping out), Perry failed (as usual) to do anything useful for his candidacy and now Gingrich is getting very close to having the ‘not Mitt’ market all to himself.

Whatever you think about Newt, there is no way you can argue that Mitt benefits from having a mano y mano contest with a single Republican challenger. Not a poll in the world has shown Mitt looking particularly strong in that position. Instead, he was counting on never coming close to that scenario until he’d won enough early victories to already appear to be the de facto nominee.

Again, whatever you may think about Newt, the fact that he can make a legitimate play for New Hampshire, Mitt’s firewall, is terrifying to them in a way that even a Perry/Bachmann/Cain victory was not. And Newt doesn’t even need to win New Hampshire. Just a closer than expected second would cause a lot of the smoke and mirrors the Mitt campaign has erected to maintain that ‘controlling share’ to vanish in the morning sun.

Right now, Mitt’s team is huddled in their office, praying to Aqua Buddha that Rick Perry makes some sort of comeback and goes after Newt.