Only days after losing two key staffers, including his New Hampshire campaign director, Republican presidential aspirant Herman Cain suffered another major defection on Friday when Tina Goff resigned as his Iowa director.
Citing concerns that the former pizza magnate wasn’t spending the necessary time and resources in Iowa to guarantee a strong showing in the Ames Straw Poll later this summer, Goff announced her resignation yesterday.
“I didn’t want it to go this way,” Goff told CNN. “I’m very sad about it.”
Battleground Blog has also learned that Kevin Hall, Cain’s Straw Poll coordinator, has also left the campaign.
Hall and Goff, a veteran of Gov. Terry Branstad’s successful 2010 campaign, both worked on Fred Thompson’s ill-fated presidential campaign in 2008.
The Cain campaign tried to downplay the significance of Goff’s departure.
“She was a junior-level staffer,” Ellen Carmichael, Cain’s communications director, told CNN. Carmichael said the campaign will be hiring an Iowa director in the near future.
Goff’s resignation comes on the heels of two other recent defections, including that of Matt Murphy, director of Cain’s New Hampshire campaign. Like Goff, Murphy had expressed concerns that the campaign wasn’t investing heavily enough — in terms of both time and money — in New Hampshire’s first-in-the-nation primary.
Murphy’s resignation, announced last Friday, had been preceded by the relatively quiet departure of Jim Zeiler, Cain’s regional field director.
Cain is polling ten percent in Iowa, according to a Des Moines Register poll released last Saturday.
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