HARAHAN, Louisiana — Rick Santorum scored his 11th victory of
the 2012 campaign Saturday, defeating Mitt Romney by a surprisingly
wide margin in the Louisiana GOP presidential primary, and the
media immediately went to work dismissing this victory as
insignificant and inconsequential.
The size of Santorum’s Louisiana victory, however, made it
hard to dismiss. While polls had shown the former Pennsylvania
senator leading by double digits, no one had imagined that he would
win by more than 20 points. Yet with 98 percent of precincts
reporting, Santorum had 49 percent to Romney’s 27 percent — and if
the margin had been much larger, Santorum would have gotten all 20
of the delegates at stake in the primary. That caused some Santorum
supporters, who gathered at the Fox and Hound tavern here to
celebrate their victory, to wonder why former House Speaker Newt
Gingrich — who finished third with 16 percent of the vote Saturday
— remains in the race. One local coordinator for Santorum stepped
outside the tavern, lit a cigarette, and said, “Newt’s killing him.
… Without Newt, we’d be at 60 percent.”
Gingrich has now admitted that he can’t possibly win the
nomination, but continues to campaign, and to disparage Santorum in
speeches and media interviews. Newt seems oblivious to the reality
that by pulling conservative votes away from Santorum, his
continued presence in the race only helps Romney, the moderate whom
Gingrich has predicted would “lose badly” to President Obama. But
his third-place finish in Louisiana, following his March 13 defeats
in Alabama and Mississippi, is likely to make Gingrich increasingly
irrelevant to the outcome of future contests.
Santorum added Louisiana to his long list of wins in the
American Heartland: Iowa, Colorado, Minnesota, Missouri, Oklahoma,
Tennessee, North Dakota, Kansas, Alabama, and Mississippi. The
persistence of his popularity among evangelical Christians — 54
percent of whom told exit pollsters in Louisiana that they had
voted for Santorum — is almost exactly mirrored by the 48 percent
support Romney gets from voters who say they care most about
whether a GOP candidate can defeat Barack Obama. The question,
however, is whether the Republican voters who consider the former
Massachusetts governor more “electable” than Santorum have
misjudged what it will take to beat Obama in November.
The problem, as both Santorum and Gingrich have pointed
out, is that Romney keeps winning Republican primaries by piling up
votes in areas dominated by Democrats and in states that will
almost certainly be carried by Obama in November. And whenever any
of his conservative rivals appears to pose a threat to his lead,
the more moderate front-runner exploits an advantage he certainly
won’t have in the fall campaign by burying his GOP opponents with a
big-money blitz of attack ads. In the most recent example of this
phenomenon, Romney won the Illinois primary Tuesday by outspending
Santorum 7-to-1 in advertising, with a 21-to-1 margin in the
Chicago market. This helped Romney add to his lead in delegates,
but does anyone seriously believe that Romney will beat Obama in
Illinois in November? Does anyone think Romney will be able to
outspend Obama 7-to-1 anywhere?
The TV commentators keep saying that Romney has a
commanding lead in the delegate count, but that lead has been built
of rather flimsy stuff. The allegedly “inevitable” nominee has
padded his delegate lead with easy wins in Democrat strongholds
like Vermont, Massachusetts, and Hawaii, and by running the table
in U.S. territories — Guam, American Samoa, Puerto Rico, etc. —
that don’t count in presidential elections but do get to send
delegates to the GOP convention. Despite all his advantages in
terms of money and endorsements, Romney has received barely 40
percent of the popular vote in the Republican primaries and
caucuses.
Santorum’s campaign spokesman Hogan Gidley issued a
statement calling the Louisiana win a “vindication,” indicating a
rejection of “the media’s and the establishment’s declaration
that we must fall in line with a moderate from
Massachusetts.” By the time the votes were counted in
Louisiana, Santorum was already in Wisconsin, which holds its
primary April 3. He watched the returns at a pub in Green Bay,
where he gave a victory speech in which he made mention of those
who have repeatedly counted him out contention.
“We don’t believe, as the pundits have said, that this
race is over. We didn’t get the memo,” Santorum said. “We’re still
here. We’re still fighting.… I’m not running as a
conservative candidate for president. I am the
conservative candidate for president.”
