Whether it’s 5, 7, 11 or 14 percentage points, all the major polls agree: Newt Gingrich should lose Election Day in Florida.

But Florida doesn’t have just one Election Day. It has a month’s worth of them because voters can cast absentee ballots by mail or go to special early-voting precincts for a 10-day stretch that ended Saturday.

At least 632,000 Republicans have already cast ballots.

So Gingrich could be losing by as many as 60,000 votes before the polls even open Tuesday, according to an analysis of early-voter surveys and the averages of all the major statewide polls applied to the pool of already cast ballots.

“I think Gingrich could be losing more to Mitt Romney — like 75,000ish,” said Randy Nielsen, a top Florida political consultant for the Republican Party of Florida who’s not affiliated with any presidential candidate.

“This election isn’t going to be pretty for Newt Gingrich,” Nielsen said. “He didn’t have a program to get early and absentee votes, and Gingrich is losing to Mitt Romney in every region except for North Florida. But he’s not winning there enough to make up the difference.”

The actual number of early ballots won by the candidates won't become known until after Election Day.

And Gingrich could be doing much better if his campaign somehow managed to get voters to flock to early-voting precincts and cast absentee ballots in numbers that well exceed the average estimates of nearly 30 scientific surveys that have a 4 percent error margin. Factor that in, and Gingrich could trail Romney by about 42,000 votes.

When absentee-ballot voting began at the beginning of the year, only Romney aggressively courted early voters. For more than a month, his campaign has called and mailed voters and reached them on Spanish- and English-language television and radio.

Gingrich was late in contacting voters, advertising in Florida and campaigning here, relative to Romney.

Still, the advertising has been so heavy on Miami’s Spanish-language airwaves that a WQBA-AM (1140) host apologized to readers that some shows had been cut short to accommodate all the political spots. Up to 2 million Republicans could vote in this election.

Nielsen released a statewide poll, conducted two days ago with Republican Party consultant Pat Bainter, showing Romney leading Gingrich, 40-30 percent. The lead is consistent with the findings of a Miami Herald/El Nuevo Herald/Tampa Bay Times survey released Sunday.

Like the Herald/Times poll, the survey from Nielsen showed Romney pulling well ahead in South Florida. Gingrich looks strongest in conservative North Florida and they’re basically tied in Tampa Bay, where the candidates made last-minute stops on Monday.

Speaking at a Jacksonville forklift supply company, Romney reminded the crowd that Gingrich was a paid consultant for mortgage giant Freddie Mac as the housing foreclosure crisis deepened.

Romney also mocked Gingrich’s campaign speech last week on the Space Coast, where he promised to push for a lunar colony as president.

“The idea of the moon as the 51st state is not what would come to my mind as a campaign basis for here in Florida,” Romney said.

Gingrich jetted across the state Monday and insisted that he was still in the game — despite a slew of publicly released polls Sunday and Monday showing him losing by anywhere from 5- to 20-percentage points.

Gingrich’s campaign insisted polls were trending his way. Tea Party Patriots, a conservative grassroots group, released a straw poll showing him the choice of 35 percent of the 600 participants. The group held a tele-conference with Gingrich, Romney and Santorum Sunday night. Santorum finished a close second, while Romney was a distant third.

At a Tampa Jet Center hangar, Gingrich was introduced by President Ronald Reagan’s son Michael Reagan and Herman Cain, who ended his 2012 GOP campaign amid allegations of sex affairs and harassment.

Reagan said Gingrich’s embodied his father’s legacy far more than Romney, whose campaign has pointed out that the former president only mentioned Gingrich once in his diaries.

“The people who are saying he wasn’t there, weren’t there,” Michael Reagan said.

Gingrich singled out Obama for making “attacks on religion” — a reference to his administration’s health care rules regarding contraception for religious institutions. And he said Romney has a similar record and accused him of imposing regulations on Catholic churches and of cutting off kosher meals for Jewish patients on Medicare “to save $5 a day.”

Gingrich singled out as an example of American ingenuity a guy in the audience who had made a poster with pictures of Obama and Romney with the caption: “Mitt no mistake: Obamacare is Romneycare.”

“I love people power, not money power and I think people power will win,” he said.

But money drives races in Florida.

Romney has a bigger, better-funded organization. He raised $24 million in the fourth quarter of 2011, far more than any of his rivals. In Florida, Romney and a political committee backing him have spent $15.9 million on TV ads so far, while Gingrich and his supporters have spent about $4 million, according to data provided by NBC.

The prize: 50 delegates needed to help ultimately nominate the national party’s nominee this summer at its Tampa convention. Gingrich has promised to fight all the way until the delegation. Ron Paul, who isn’t campaigning in Florida, is trying to win caucus states, such as Maine.

A prolonged race could get messy, and because of the Republicans’ complex delegate selection rules, no one is likely to amass the 1,144 delegates needed for nomination until at least April.

Some Republicans worry that a long campaign will only help Obama. But the Herald’s recent poll, for instance, showed Romney edging the president, albeit within the survey’s error margin.

Republican primaries in Florida are often tough affairs. But despite that, in the past decade, Republicans have gone on to win general elections against Democrats.

Steve Schale, a Democratic consultant who headed up Obama’s successful 2008 campaign in Florida, said Republicans will rally behind their nominee.

“No one circles the wagons like Republicans,” Schale said.

McClatchy Washington Bureau reporters Lesley Clark, William Douglas and David Lightman contributed to this report. The Miami Herald’s Patricia Mazzei also contributed.