The last time Newt Gingrich was in Columbia, about 10 peopled showed up to hear him speak at the Lizard's Thicket on Assembly Street.

He was at 5 percent in the polls, had lost nearly all of his top S.C. consultants and his campaign was $1.1 million in debt.

But Friday, he spoke to about 300 people at Blue Marlin restaurant in the Vista as the frontrunner in South Carolina. He has 12 paid staffers in the state, and - according to reports - he has raised $10 million in this quarter alone.

And he's betting it all on South Carolina.

"If I win South Carolina, I believe I will be the nominee," Gingrich told the crowd.

Gingrich has a sizable lead in South Carolina, according to the latest poll this week from Clemson University. He trails in the other two early voting states of Iowa and New Hampshire. But Gingrich says he doesn't need to win those two states, just finish well enough to give him momentum heading into South Carolina's GOP presidential primary on Jan. 21.

"Historically, since 1980, South Carolina has created the momentum to win" the nomination, Gingrich said to reporters after his speech. "Because you go from here to Florida; if you win here you have a huge level of momentum. That's just historically a fact."

No one has ever won South Carolina without winning either Iowa or New Hampshire. And no candidate has ever won the GOP nomination without winning South Carolina.

"For a campaign that did not have a pulse two months ago, our goal is to do the best we can with the resources we have and the time we have to do it," said Gingrich spokesman R.C. Hammond.

Gingrich hosted a Christmas lunch and town hall meeting on the sidewalk in front of Blue Marlin, where he focused mostly on attacking President Barack Obama but reserved a few shots for Republican rival Mitt Romney.

He took questions from the crowd, some friendly and others less so, before speaking with reporters on the restaurant's back porch - where he said if he were elected president, he would drop the Justice Department's lawsuit against South Carolina regarding its new immigration law.

"It's pretty outrageous when the federal government fails to do its job and then attacks the states for trying to fill the gap created by the federal government," he told reporters after speaking to the crowd for about an hour.

Thursday, a federal judge threw out three sections of South Carolina's new immigration law. Those sections - including allowing police officers to check on people's immigration status during traffic stops - will most likely be settled before the U.S. Supreme Court sometime next year.