“Some of the southerners who’ve run campaigns here have run lousy campaigns,” Carney said. “I don’t think geography has anything to do with it.”

The many factors that separate Dallas from Dover may indeed prove to be difficult for Perry to master, but a greater challenge might be the style of politicking that differentiates a state as large as Texas from one as small as New Hampshire.

New Hampshire GOP consultant Mike Dennehy, a senior political adviser to McCain’s 2008 campaign, noted that successful New Hampshire candidates have to run “like it’s a city council race” — a scale of campaigning that Perry has not engaged in for decades. But Dennehy added that inherent regional disadvantages did not become a significant consideration during his brief stint working for Haley Barbour in New Hampshire earlier this year as the Mississippi governor weighed a presidential bid that he eventually decided against…

“His obvious disgust for the federal government makes him attractive to the tea party-aligned voters here,” Andrew Hemingway, chairman of the New Hampshire Republican Liberty Caucus, told RCP.