Sheldon Adelson Says Gingrich Candidacy Reaching an End Sheldon Adelson, the Las Vegas billionaire who has been the biggest backer to a group supporting Newt Gingrich, said this week that Mr. Gingrich had reached "the end of his line" in his bid for the presidency. Mr. Adelson, whose family has contributed more than $15 million to a "super PAC" supporting Mr. Gingrich, made the comments in a brief interview with The Jewish Journal at the Venetian resort in Las Vegas. After singing Mr. Gingrich's praises, Mr. Adelson responded to a reporter's comment that the candidate was not likely to be the Republican presidential nominee. It appears as though he's at the end of his line," Mr. Adelson said. Because mathematically, he can't get anywhere near the numbers, and there's unlikely to be a brokered convention. The acknowledgement came even as The Washington Times reported on Thursday that Mr. Gingrich had secretly met with Mitt Romney in Louisiana over the weekend. The paper quoted Mr. Gingrich as saying that "there is no agreement of any kind, and I plan to go all the way to Tampa," where Republicans will hold their national convention at the end of August. Aides to Mr. Gingrich and Mr. Romney refused to confirm whether the two had met. "The only thing I can share with you is our candidate does speak to the other Republican candidates frequently,"" said R.C. Hammond, a spokesman for the Gingrich campaign. While Mr. Hammond would not confirm a meeting with Mr. Romney in Louisiana, it would have been impossible for the two to have met on Saturday, the day The Washington Times said the meeting took place. Mr. Romney had left the state the evening before, although both men were in the New Orleans area on Friday. Mr. Gingrich's campaign on Tuesday night announced that it was cutting staff and scaling back the candidate's activities. Joe DeSantis, the campaign's communications director, said the move was an acknowledgment that Mr. Gingrich could not collect enough delegates to win the nomination before the convention. But Mr. Gingrich is betting that Mr. Romney won't be able to clinch the nomination by the convention either and that conservative delegates might then turn to Mr. Gingrich to be the nominee. Among the campaign staff that were let go were Mr. Gingrich's advance and events-planning team, which once numbered 16 or 17, working in several states to lay the groundwork for his appearances. "It doesn't come as a big shock,"" said Gordon James, the former head of advance operations, who has worked on many campaigns and knows that when the money trickles out, his staff gets cut. "You take whatever funds you have and divert them into something else, and usually it's the road and events that suffer,"" he said. Mr. Gingrich planned an appearance at Marquette University in Milwaukee on Thursday evening, and his campaign, which usually only announces his schedule a day or two in advance, distributed an itinerary seemingly designed to show his commitment to going on: appearances in Washington, Maryland, North Carolina and Delaware through next week. But every day more evidence accumulates that voters and donors are abandoning Mr. Gingrich. On Thursday, for the first time this year, he polled below Representative Ron Paul of Texas in a Gallup daily tracking poll, pulling 10 percent of Republicans and independents who lean Republican, for fourth place.