Rick Santorum Seeks Momentum Out West
NEW YORK (
) -- Rick Santorum's American tale has seized a theme from the film "Fievel Goes West."
The former Pennsylvania senator skipped a Florida ground campaign and crossed the Mississippi to concentrate on Colorado and Missouri; states where his campaign thinks Santorum can pull off primary surprises.
Rick Santorum |
"It's looking real good
in Missouri," one source in Santorum's campaign says. "The draw, right now, is very strong in our favor -- obviously some recent polls have been very positive towards us -- but I think it's going to be very interesting, at least, to see the head-to-head matchup with the senator and Gov. Romney here."
Santorum is a heavy underdog for Saturday's Nevada caucuses and his momentum has slowed since a surprise Iowa caucus victory on Jan. 3, but a Jan. 31
Public Policy Polling
Missouri survey showed Santorum slightly behind Newt Gingrich and just ahead of Mitt Romney in the Show Me state. Gingrich, Santorum and Romney grabbed 30%, 28% and 24% of voter favor, respectively.
Missouri
has an odd voting process in which the state will hold a non-binding Feb. 7 primary that Gingrich isn't on the ballot for, but the Missouri Republican Party will hold a March 17 binding caucus that Gingrich will be part of.
Santorum's numbers leap among Missouri Republican primary voters as Gingrich doesn't qualify for that ballot. In the primary poll, Santorum leads with 45% against Romney's 34%, the
PPP
poll found.
The latest Colorado poll came in the first week of December at the tail-end of Gingrich's November surge, and a month before the GOP primary season kicked off, but Santorum's people say the caucus-style state favors the retail political style of their candidate.
Another Santorum campaign source says that maybe its biggest get yet in Colorado is former U.S. Rep. Bob Schaffer's endorsement of the former senator. The source says many Coloradans consider Schaffer a major leader of the state's conservative movement.
Interest may have ratcheted up thanks to Schaffer's nod and the addition of support from former Rep. Tom Tancredo and former Lt. Gov. Jane Norton.
"It's kind of crazy here, we're doing the Weld County Lincoln Day Dinner on Saturday night ... they announced it on
Jan. 28 and they had 180 people who had already bought $50 tickets," the source says. "By Monday afternoon they had sold a capacity of 550 tickets and had to expand and create the whole standing-room-only section ... so we're actually kind of cautiously optimistic about Colorado."
Others aren't as enthusiastic about Santorum's chances.
"Had there been a little bit more bifurcation earlier, could a conservative on a roll have come in to Colorado and really made a dent?" says Todd Vitale, a Republican Colorado pollster. "I think possibly, but given that you've still got a divided conservative vote and you've got Romney with pretty good standing here, our Republican party here, we've got a lot of pragmatic conservatives that are thinking that Romney is the guy to beat Obama."
Vitale says he thinks Santorum is hoping for a Gingrich gaffe to force the former House speaker out so that he can become the only conservative in the race -- Vitale says he thinks Gingrich is hoping for a similar scenario with regard to Santorum.
Indeed, conservative columnist
Bill Kristol wrote Wednesday that Gingrich voters could move to Santorum if the former Pennsylvania senator outperforms Gingrich in Colorado and challenges Romney in Missouri.
The Santorum source says they'd get a crucial bump if their campaign goes head-to-head with Romney in Missouri and outperforms where Gingrich finished in Florida against the Massachusetts governor.
"Missouri's kind of a population contest, but it does offer someone the ability to point to the fact that they carried another state even though there's no delegates there," says Sig Rogich, a former Ronald Reagan advisor who runs his own advisory firm. "If Gingrich got out of this right now, I don't see any state that Santorum or
Ron Paul takes on Super Tuesday."
The odds are stacked high against Santorum, but the former senator and his campaign have refused to step down and are adamant that they're in the GOP race's long haul.
"We're not going all-in anywhere. ... Our job is to keep going," says the Santorum source. "We're not going to try to land a knock-out blow against anyone, our job is to basically make the case and make the case and make the case, and hopefully Newt will implode and Romney will continue to unify conservatives against him."
-- Written by Joe Deaux in New York.
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