WASHINGTON — Newt Gingrich may agree with Mayor Bloomberg about the current state of national politics, but the one-time Republican House speaker doesn’t think the mayor has much of a chance to win the presidency.

Mr. Gingrich, who may enter the presidential race himself this fall, said yesterday that Mr. Bloomberg’s “entire basis of survival is paying $91 a vote for an election,” making for a “very limited base” on which to run for president.

“I suspect at the presidential level, people would be offended at the idea that some rich guy could buy their vote,” Mr. Gingrich told a group of reporters and conservative columnists yesterday at a breakfast sponsored by the American Spectator. Of the mayor’s stewardship of the city, Mr. Gingrich said: “I think some of what he’s done has been very effective.” He praised Mr. Bloomberg for building on Mayor Giuliani’s success in transforming the city, but he said that without the inherent political base of a major party, a self-financed campaign by the billionaire mayor would not resonate with voters in a more populist national electorate.

While each has been coy about his own presidential aspirations, both Messrs. Gingrich and Bloomberg have spent the past several months railing about partisanship and the failure of Washington to confront major problems. Mr. Gingrich’s swipe at the mayor comes three months after he joined him at a Manhattan event aimed at building support among top political donors for the city’s priorities.

As he did yesterday, in the April appearance the architect of the 1994 “Contract with America” lauded Mr. Bloomberg’s performance at City Hall, while the mayor joked that Mr. Gingrich would “make a great vice presidential candidate.”

Political analysts viewed Mr. Gingrich’s comments about the mayor through the prism of the former speaker’s own ambitions, as an independent run by Mr. Bloomberg could damage Mr. Gingrich if he were the Republican nominee. They also found his criticism of Mr. Bloomberg’s self-financing curious, given his two successful campaigns for City Hall. “In New York, people didn’t care,” a Democratic political consultant, Joseph Mercurio, said. “The opposition occasionally tried to raise it, and it had no impact.”

As for his own potential candidacy, Mr. Gingrich said not much has changed. Decrying the 2008 campaign as a game show, he professed to have “no interest in the current political process,” but he held fast to his previously stated plans to decide in the fall, probably mid-October, whether to run.

In the meantime, Mr. Gingrich is organizing a pair of late-September nationwide online workshops through his political action committee, American Solutions for Winning the Future. Those will coincide with the anniversary of the “Contract with America” launch and will likely thrust him into the spotlight that could lead to a presidential campaign.

Whether Mr. Gingrich runs could depend on the candidacy of Fred Thompson, the former Tennessee senator likely to enter the race officially after Labor Day. If Mr. Thompson succeeds in exciting the conservative Republican base, Mr. Gingrich may stay on the sidelines.

But the former House speaker hinted that he isn’t sure that will happen, and he lightly jabbed Mr. Thompson yesterday. “I’m excited to see whether Fred turns out to be as decisive a front-runner as John McCain, or better,” Mr. Gingrich said, referring to the Arizona senator whose campaign has crumbled in recent weeks. And continuing his critique of the current campaign environment, he said Mr. Thompson, a star of “Law & Order,” had “decided to leave television for the purpose of entering television.”

The two almost-candidates share similar political views and a Southern heritage but have vastly different personal styles. A former college professor in Georgia, Mr. Gingrich is known as the consummate “ideas man,” while Mr. Thompson exudes authentic Southern charm in a familiar drawl, often articulating his policy positions in general terms rather than the specifics favored by Mr. Gingrich.

Both men are looking at a wide open Republican field, with voters far from coalescing around any of the leading candidates — Mr. Giuliani, Mitt Romney, or Mr. McCain.

A Republican primary that includes both Messrs. Thompson and Gingrich is “absolutely possible,” the dean of Baruch College’s School of Public Affairs, David Birdsell, said.

“Fred Thompson wants that same conservative mantle, so whether you get there by being an attractive, ‘aw shucks’ Tennessee politician via television, or whether you get there by being a brainy Georgian with a sometimes overly tart tongue, that’s anyone’s guess,” Mr. Birdsell said.

A prominent Washington conservative who attended yesterday’s event, Grover Norquist of Americans for Tax Reform, said Mr. Thompson’s candidacy “would appear to shade some of the sunlight” from Mr. Gingrich but that the Republican race remained fluid.

In his hour-long appearance yesterday, the ever candid Mr. Gingrich had choice observations about a wide range of political topics. He predicted the Democratic presidential pairing in 2008 would be Senators Clinton and Obama, which he said would be “a wonderfully left-wing, deeply compassionate, Oprah Winfrey ticket.”

And he heightened his criticism of President Bush, saying the Republican Party didn’t stand a chance next year if it didn’t get beyond “the Bush era.”

“It’s a very simple equation: If we’re still in the Bush era next year, we lose,” he said. “It’s just over, and there’s no point in worrying much about it.”