Last cycle, Mitt Romney didn’t just win Minnesota. He dominated, beating second-place finisher John McCain by 19 points.
This time around, Romney is fighting a surging Rick Santorum. A Public Policy Polling survey released today shows Santorum at 33 percent, with Romney behind him at 24 percent. Newt Gingrich and Ron Paul are close on Romney’s heels, at 22 percent and 20 percent respectively.
Talking to a Romney insider yesterday, Minnesota GOP strategist Gregg Peppin heard that the campaign was concerned about Santorum. “He said, ‘Well, I think Santorum could take this thing,’” recounts Peppin. “They felt that Santorum was making a late charge here, not unlike Iowa.”
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Romney’s campaign appeared to be doing its best to halt Santorum’s unexpected surge, sending out an avalanche of e-mails yesterday to reporters attacking Santorum’s record and pointing out that Santorum endorsed Romney last cycle. In an interview on Minneapolis radio station WCCO yesterday, Romney spared no words when talking about Santorum. “His policies are, in my view, those of many Republicans in Congress who went along with Democrats to raise the debt ceiling, to [allow] earmarks, and to [grow] the size of federal government to a level that is frankly choking off the capacity of our economy to grow at the rate it should,” Romney said, according to the Associated Press. “I think his approach was not effective.”
Meanwhile, campaigning in Minnesota yesterday, Santorum attacked Romney, saying, per Politico, “Governor Romney is absolutely incapable of making the case against Obamacare successfully, and therefore greatly damages our ability to be able to win this election, this very critical election in 2012.”
Currently, the PPP poll gives Santorum the lead among tea partiers, those who are very conservative, and evangelicals. Despite being endorsed by top evangelicals across the nation in a meeting held in Texas in January, Santorum has not won the evangelical vote post-Iowa; Romney won among evangelicals in New Hampshire and Nevada, while Gingrich won them in South Carolina and Florida, according to exit polls. But the tide may be shifting.
“I feel like I was hearing Gingrich a week and a half ago, and the past week I’m now hearing Santorum,” remarks Carol Schulstad, president of the Minnesota Faith and Freedom Coalition, about the preferences of Minnesota evangelicals. (Neither Schulstad nor the Coalition has endorsed a candidate.) She speculates the change might be driven by voters turned off by the negative sparring between the Gingrich and Romney campaigns.
But the race is hardly just a Romney–Santorum rivalry. Peppin speculates that Minnesota might see “a tight four-way race.”
“Any of the four candidates could win if turnout is light,” agrees Minnesota GOP strategist Ben Golnik. If turnout is low, he thinks Paul could emerge the victor. And Gingrich, Golnik adds, is “a wild card” in the caucuses.
As for Santorum, he pushed the audience at a Minnesota campaign event Sunday to vote for him so that they “can stop the streak” of wins Romney’s had, according to the AFP.
The simple fact is that someone who votes for Moron Romney, adulterer Gingrich or papist Santorum is someone the Founders would condemn, as they would never have been tolerated in government by them in the days prior to our present woeful state of historically and Biblically illiterate antiChristian bigotry (sadly including most professing so-called "christians"). They promised that such a development would most certainly be fatal to our nation as it's proving to be, so only God can save us now.
The Catholic Church is the only significant christian body that upholds the absolute sanctity of marriage and the dignity in life. And that is a fact. Yeah, there might be one or two small protestant sects that are not morally relative in their teachings, but they are quite small and usually not articulate enough to put together a cogent argument for their belief system other than to state, "hey jesus said so". Come to think of it, do you belong to one of those sects or are you a theological island unto yourself. Come on, knock it off.
Santorum is a big government social conservative and Romney is Obama lite. I find it very hard to believe that any complaint from the right by Romney about Santorum would not also apply to Romney.
Santorum's ratings during sixteen years in Congress:-
American Conservative Union -- 88%
National Right to Life Committee -- 100%
Americans for Tax Reform -- 95%
National Tax Limitation Committee -- 92%
U.S. Chamber of Commerce -- 88%
League of Private Property Voters -- 94%
Social conservative? Yes. Big government? I don't think so.
Will Romney make a positive case for his candidacy or simply try to run up Santorum's negatives?
It worked on Newt, but I think (a) some thought Newt 'deserved' it (since he already had fairly high unfavorables and (b) many of us will dislike it if Romney's principal argument isn't about making a case for himself but rather scorching every other Republican in the field.
In short, as a late-arrival Santorum supporter, I hope Romney and Santorum keep it reasonable.
I'll be caucusing here in MN tonight, and I'm leaning heavily toward Santorum. I caucused for Romney in '08. I've seen Romney's statement that no delegates are on the line, so it is no big deal. Can anyone direct me to Romney's statement after winning here in '08? My google skills have come up short.
I'm caucusing for Rick Santorum tonight in Minnesota.
I voted for Romney in "08...before I knew about the details of Romneycare. If Romney can't get health care reform done right in Mass. then he can't be trusted to do it right at the federal level.
"Can anyone direct me to Romney's statement after winning here in '08? My google skills have come up short."
The 2008 MN primary was on Super Tuesday, so he may not have made any specific statement about the individual state of Minnesota. And to further complicate things, the day after the MN primary was when Romney dropped out of the race: External Link
My google-fu found links to more articles, but all were pay-only.
"Can anyone direct me to Romney's statement after winning here in '08? My google skills have come up short."
The 2008 MN primary was on Super Tuesday, so he may not have made any specific statement about the individual state of Minnesota. And to further complicate things, the day after the MN primary was when Romney dropped out of the race: External Link
My google-fu found links to more articles, but all were pay-only.
“Governor Romney is absolutely incapable of making the case against Obamacare successfully, and therefore greatly damages our ability to be able to win this election, this very critical election in 2012.”
Romney says Obamacare is bad policy and that if elected he will take immediate measures by executive order to stop it. Does Santorum think Romney won't really stop it? What is it that we're supposed to believe makes Romney "absolutely incapable" of arguing against Obamacare? He's been doing it for months!
Isn't this a more accurate statement: "Senator Santorum is absolutely incapable of appealing to cross-over voters, and therefore greatly damages our ability to be able to win this election, this very critical election in 2012.”
Santorum's point is a good one. Romney will be ineffective against *Obama* in arguing against Obamacare. Yes, Romney will keep protesting that he only meant for it to be implemented at the state level. But the argument against Obamacare will have lost its sting when Obama thanks him for all his excellent ideas.
Romney's surrogates (see Pam Bondi and Norm Coleman, among others) are already making a case for Obamacare Lite. Romney cannot be trusted on healthcare insurance.
1. Romney does not opposed individual mandate a the state level (Romneycare) but a national level (Obamacare), therefore his argument against Obamacare does not rely on the conservative principle that opposes any type of regulation at any level of government of healthcare but relies on abstract (hard to explain) conservative principle of states rights. This posture is unconvincing at best, cynical at worst.
The question is not whether Romney is going to do everything he can to repeal and replace Obamacare but whether or not he can successfully persecute Obamacare before the American public. In my opinion he can’t without some mental gymnastics.
2. Santorum has appealed to wide section of voters: his re-election in PA demonstrated this point. Yes, he lost by wide-margin but you can’t discount the toxic electoral environment in which he lost took place.
Please don’t forget that Romney’s prospects for re-election weren’t that good…otherwise why he did not run for re-election?
Hardcastle is right. Romney’s only real objection so far is that one size should not fit all. That is a constitutional argument at best even though he thinks mandated insurance was a great idea for his State. If the Supremes say it is constitutional, then the argument can still be made that one size does not fit all but it loses its persuasion. It loses more persuasion when you don’t hear him making a strong case for that on minimum wage laws, etc...Ron Paul is the best one to make the case on Federalism. Santorum is the best one to make the case on both federalism and the merits. Bottom line, Obamacare has to be hit hard on the merits, not just on a tenth amendment argument that will be lost on voters. Romney has said that he will sign an executive order allowing States to opt out. That is not good enough. While he might try to repeal the bill as well, he will have difficulty persuading people as he has conceded the merits by adopting a plan in his state. In short, Romney cannot knock down the model he created, its that plain and simple.
"Will Romney make a positive case for his candidacy or simply try to run up Santorum's negatives?"
Can we just step back for a minute and consider what would actually happen in the general election if the GOP nominated Santorum?
Basically, it wold be the contraception debate after Iowa, multiplied a zillion times. I know Santorum's fans on NRO tried to ridicule that debate away, but Santorum's wild and wacky social-issues stuff would be anything but ridiculous to independent and even some Republican voters.
The GOP would get tagged as a bunch of loons who want to confiscate your birth control pills, put gays into some concentration camp closet, and generally return America to Queen Victoria's stodgier notions. This is not an exaggeration. It's exactly what the Dems and their buddies in the media would do.
And at that point you could (chastely) kiss any chances of beating Obama away. Instead of focusing on four years of low growth, high unemployment, and staggering deficits, we'd be hearing about Rick's ideas on sex. Just great.
The only question is whether Santorum might endanger the GOP House majority, which has kept Barry in check over the past couple years. I don't think so, but I don't want to take the chance. (You could, again chastely, kiss any chance of a GOP Senate away.)
I'm so sick and tired of suffering through predictions of how nasty the left will be if the nominee is not Romney, as if they'll suddenly find manners in a race against Willard.
The political left will never have anything nice to say about conservatives, or moderate GOP members either, regardless of which conservative or moderate they're talking about.
So, it would be nice if people were not animated to take courses of action out of efforts to avoid the incessant criticisms of their enemies.
No one is saying that the Left is going to play nice with Romney. What we are saying is that Santorum and Gingrich give the MSM and the Left a bonanza of material to work with - to demonize and discredit. We can't take that risk.
While having many admirable qualities, Santorum is an absolute loser in November. Beyond the distortion of his positions, he has no money, no organization, no infrastructure, no chance to mount the kind of campaign necessary to unseat an incumbent president.
That is nonsense. Romney and his Super PACs will nearly match Obama dollar-for-dollar. No other GOP candidate has that arsenal of money, organization, infrastructure and ground troops.
To suggest that "the money will come" is trite, absurd, and false. We tried that with McCain - nominating someone with no bread, no organization. It takes YEARS to amass the resources and ground game to unseat an incumbent president.
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