Amid many signs that the race for the 2012 Republican nomination will end with former Gov. Mitt Romney as nominee, here is another sign that it will end that way — and perhaps quite soon. A poll finds former New Senator Rick Santorum may be tanking in his home state of Pennsyvania — a must win state if Santorum ever had one:
Rick Santorum appeared to be the Republican presidential candidate to beat in Pennsylvania a month ago.
With the state primary four weeks away, Santorum now finds himself nearly tied with former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney among the state’s Republicans, and support is eroding rapidly, according to a Franklin & Marshall College poll out today.
“The real Rick Santorum has emerged,” said G. Terry Madonna, director of the Franklin & Marshall College Poll.
“Santorum ran a disciplined campaign for eight months, but a month ago he began veering off message into all these cultural and social issues,” Madonna said, referring to flare-ups over women in combat and contraceptives. “That may help with his core voters, but they’re already with him. This is supposed to be about expanding your base.”
The poll of 505 registered Republican voters, conducted March 20-25 in conjunction with the Tribune-Review and other media outlets, shows Santorum clinging to a small lead over Romney, 30 percent to 28 percent, within the poll’s 4.2 percent margin of error.
That’s a big change from February, when Santorum, once a U.S. senator from Penn Hills, held a commanding 15-percentage-point lead over Romney in the poll.
“I was really rooting for Santorum because he’s from Pennsylvania, but I switched over to Romney because I think he has a better chance of beating Obama and that he’d do a better job of running this country like a business,” said poll participant Rick Bierer, 51, a factory worker from Ford City.
Rep. Ron Paul of Texas, a Green Tree native, and former House Speaker Newt Gingrich, who grew up near Harrisburg, are a distant third and fourth in today’s poll.
The poll shows a worsening public opinion of Santorum. His favorability rating of 54 percent is down from 65 percent a month ago, although that remains higher than the 46 percent rating for Romney, the national front-runner.
This again underscores Santorum’s fatal flaw. Gingrich’s was his own bloated sense of self-importance, that any utterance he made would be recorded in history and reflected brilliant ideas. That was Gingrich’s impression — not the bulk of voters’. So as soon as Gingrich began zooming in the polls, he began holding forth and losing voters.
Romney’s problem has been that he is a gaffe machine when he doesn’t have a script — an even bigger problem than his attempt to downplay and run from his record as a moderate Governor (and a governor many moderates liked) during his time in office.
Santorum’s problem has been clear. He zoomed in the polls as conservatives realized he could be a strong conservative, a sincere versus severe conservative, and a tough political fighter. But then he started to talk on social issues, advocating positions not just out of the country’s mainstream but out of some of the Republican Party’s mainstream. And his sometimes over-the-top political polemics left him open to attacks, showed his vulnerabilities in a general election and caused him to walk back some of them. And there was the other factor: Romney obliterating him with big bucks on advertising to beat him down.
Santorum had a moment when it looked like he might derail Romney. Like Gingrich, he lost that moment.
In Pennsylvania, it has been a “given” that he needed to win that state and would likely win it. If he loses there, it’d be a huge humiliation for him and suggest that his national political career — like Gingrich’s — is effectively over not just this year but in the future.
Joe Gandelman is a former fulltime journalist who freelanced in India, Spain, Bangladesh and Cypress writing for publications such as the Christian Science Monitor and Newsweek. He also did radio reports from Madrid for NPR’s All Things Considered. He has worked on two U.S. newspapers and quit the news biz in 1990 to go into entertainment. He also has written for The Week and several online publications, did a column for Cagle Cartoons Syndicate and has appeared on CNN.