After losing the first two early contests, the Iowa caucuses and the New Hampshire primary, Governor Romney could punctuate an unexpected turn of good fortune in the presidential race with a win in today’s Florida primary. Even if Mr. Romney cannot defeat Senator McCain in Florida but finishes a close second, as yesterday’s polls suggested, the result would likely mean a two-man race for the remainder of the Republican nomination fight.

The former governor of Massachusetts is the candidate who is hip to sneer at: His voice resembles that of a 1970s television anchorman, his hair is so perfect it evokes envy in television reporters, his bearing is so calm and smooth it sometimes makes observers wonder whether there is a live human being underneath his skin and not some highly programmed android.

Yet Mr. Romney boasts attributes that could win him the Republican nomination. He’s well financed, able to both raise money from his networks and use his own. He’s tenacious. One reason he survived early defeats, unlike Mayor Giuliani, is that he entered the race knowing the tremendous cost in personal time and energy that a presidential campaign entailed. The only proven way for a presidential candidate to be taken seriously in primaries is to compete in them. Mr. Romney may have taken this a step too far by attempting to position himself as the candidate of Christian conservatives in Iowa.

By staying in the game in every early contest, he gave himself room to find traction. He acted like he was running one of the start-up companies he financed and advised in his business career. His approach seemed to be to trying different business models until he found one that worked for politics.

During Mr. Romney’s inaugural speech as Massachusetts’ governor and throughout his early remarks when he began his presidential campaign, he would use an abstruse phrase, “an inflection point” to mark a moment of change. Sometimes he would use this when talking about the point at which a smaller, nimble company, such as Jet-Blue, could beat an old traditional one, such as United Airlines. He described September 11, 2001 as “a pivotal inflection point.” Other times he would use the phrase to refer to the challenge America faced from rising economic competitors, India, and China.

Inflection point, according to Robert Cringely, a technology columnist at pbs.org, means “an abrupt elbow in a graph of growth or decline when the new technology or paradigm truly kicks in.” It’s a phrase that would seem more at home in Silicon Valley than in the world of politics.

Yet Mr. Romney’s campaign has become stronger as a paradigm shift has taken place in America and the presidential race. Talk in the months leading up to the early primaries was dominated by foreign policy, immigration, and the war, none of which are strong points for Mr. Romney. When he lost Iowa and New Hampshire, Mr. Romney lurched at Michigan, where he was raised and where his father, George Romney, had served as governor. Out of necessity, Mr. Romney zeroed in on the most important issue in the state, the economy, a natural subject for the graduate of Harvard Business School, a business consultant, and a company financier.

During the first two weeks in January that Mr. Romney took to find his message, the Dow Jones Industrial Index fell 763 points. This took the economy from a peripheral issue to center stage. Like one of his agile former clients, Mr. Romney turned his campaign on a dime. He began appearing in public without a tie or suit jacket, sometimes with his shirtsleeves rolled up. He stepped up his comments about the economy. A week and a half prior to the Florida primary and in advance of Congressional agreement upon a plan for the economy, Mr. Romney announced a $233 billion economic stimulus proposal.

Economic matters come less naturally to Mr. McCain. In the Republican debate from Florida last week, Mr. McCain took issue with a quote attributed to him by Tim Russert of NBC, “the issue of economics is not something I’ve understood as well as I should.” Though the senator of Arizona has cited the endorsement of a chief economic adviser to Ronald Reagan, Martin Feldstein, as evidence of his prowess on the matter. Mr. McCain supports permanently ending the alternative minimum tax as well as the research and development tax credit. He also has come out in favor of a ban on taxes on the Internet and cell phones.

Mr. Giuliani has brandished the economic turnaround of New York City when he was mayor and trumpeted the backing of Steve Forbes, who described Mr. Giuliani’s tax proposal as “the largest tax cut in modern American history.” He has also talked about a stimulus plan, but the political reality is that it may be too late for Mr. Giuliani.

It’s too early to measure whether Mr. Romney can actually defeat the honorable and press-adept Mr. McCain. Although the coiffed former governor will strive to perform well in California and several of the mountain states that have similar demographics to Nevada, an early caucus he won.

Because of the nature of the primary season, where candidates spend an inordinate amount of time in a few small locations without many delegates at stake, Mr. Romney now gets a chance to introduce himself via the airwaves to voters less familiar with his earlier campaign platforms. They will see Mr. Romney, the economic fixer, his most solid and effective identity yet as the future president of America.

Mr. Gitell (gitell.com) is a contributing editor of The New York Sun.