STEUBENVILLE, Ohio — Rick Santorum kept his GOP presidential
campaign alive on Super Tuesday, and as he took the stage inside a
high school gymnasium here, he was smiling like a winner. He had
already been declared the victor in Tennessee and Oklahoma, and
would add another win in the North Dakota caucuses later in the
evening. When he gave his speech shortly after 9 p.m. Tuesday, the
latest results showed Santorum leading in the crucial battleground
of Ohio.
“We’ve won races all over this country against the odds,”
Santorum told his cheering supporters. “When they
thought, ‘Oh, OK, he’s finally
finished,’ we keep coming back.”
Indeed, after last week’s tough loss in the Michigan
primary, it appeared that Santorum might be on the verge of being
“finally finished,” but the former Pennsylvania senator fought back
to re-establish himself as the conservative alternative to Mitt
Romney.
“We need a person running against President Obama who is
right on the issues and truthful with the American public,”
Santorum told the crowd in Steubenville, a gritty blue-collar city
across the Ohio River from West Virginia. “We need a
fighter, someone who grew
up in communities like this.”
Santorum clearly believes he is that fighter, and the
Super Tuesday results ensured that his fight for the Republican
nomination would go on. The lead in Ohio seesawed back and forth
past midnight. “Too close to call,” the TV commentators kept
saying, even as they discussed the significance of the result.
Whatever the final totals, Santorum had scored at least a moral
victory on a night that once more exposed the weakness of Romney as
the GOP front-runner.
The outcome of Super Tuesday also put pressure on former
House Speaker Newt Gingrich, who won his home state of Georgia, but
placed third in several other states, and finished fourth in both
North Dakota and Vermont. Before the polls closed in Ohio, the
Santorum campaign’s senior strategist John Brabender seemed to
express frustration at the way Gingrich continues splitting the
anti-Romney vote. “Let me ask you this, if you’re Newt Gingrich,
and you get, what, 15 percent of the vote, what does that say about
you?” Brabender said. “If you come in third or fourth in Vermont,
what does that say about you? Really, the true story is two things
to me, Gingrich can only perform in certain states, and whereas
Rick Santorum can do well in a lot of states.”
Gingrich got slightly less than 15 percent of the vote in
Ohio where, with 95 percent of precincts reporting near midnight,
Romney led Santorum by less than 1 percentage point, a margin of
barely 7,000 votes out of more than a million cast. Santorum’s
strategist Brabender said Romney “knows darn well that there are
conservatives and Tea Party voters who are splitting the votes, and
that’s the only way he can move forward, and his worst nightmare is
that we can get this down to a true test of conservatives.”
Romney’s weakness was on display not only here in Ohio, where he
got less than 40 percent of the vote despite outspending Santorum
by a 6-to-1 margin, but also in Virginia, where neither Gingrich
nor Santorum was on the ballot and more than 40 percent cast their
votes for Texas Rep. Ron Paul.
Weak as he is, however, Romney continues steadily
accumulating an edge in the delegate count, and at least one
analyst has
predicted that it is already impossible for any other candidate
but Romney to get the 1,144 delegates necessary to win the GOP
nomination on the first ballot at the August convention in Tampa.
Yet that prediction was based on a mathematical formula that might
become instantly obsolete if Santorum could drive Gingrich out of
the race. Santorum’s Tuesday win in Tennessee suggested that
Gingrich might be vulnerable to a challenge in the South. That may
explain why Santorum began his post-Super Tuesday campaign schedule
with a Wednesday trip to Alabama, which votes next week, as does
Mississippi. If Santorum were to defeat Gingrich in those Deep
South states, the battle for the Republican nomination could come
down to a “true test of conservatives” — Santorum vs. Romney —
rather quickly.
Santorum’s campaign is also clearly willing
to carry their fight all the way to the convention. When
a reporter asked Santorum spokesman Hogan Gidley about the Romney
camp’s claim that Santorum can’t win a majority of delegates,
Gidley retorted: “He’s got to get to
1,144 too.… He wants us out because he can’t get there.” If a
drawn-out campaign leaves both candidates short of the magic
number, Gidley said, “so be it.”
It was half-past midnight in Steubenville when the
Associated Press at last declared that Romney had narrowly won
Ohio, but by then Santorum’s supporters had already left the high
school gym, confident that their candidate was still in the
fight.
