Perhaps former Senator Rick Santorum’s increasingly over the top comments (the latest is that he said JFK’s 1960 speech about separation of church and state made him want to puke) have started to catch up with him. A new Gallup tracking poll shows Romney has now inched ahead of the latest anti-Romney frontrunner, Santorum:
Gallup’s tracking poll shows GOP presidential hopeful Mitt Romney overtaking rival Rick Santorum nationally, after a tumultuous February which saw the presumptive frontrunner trail by double digits in many national polls.
Numbers released Sunday show Romney with the support of 31 percent of likely-GOP voters with Santorum at 29 percent. Former House Speaker Newt Gingrich comes in third with 15 percent support.
Support for Romney has surged nationally; last week Santorum held a 10 point lead over the former Massachusetts governor, in Gallup’s survey. Saturday’s Gallup five-day average showed Santorum only up 1 point, with 31 percent support to Romney’s 30 percent.
Santorum had surged to the top of polls nationally and in key states after he rode a trifecta of victories in the Minnesota, Missouri and Colorado primaries earlier this month.
Romney also fell behind in polls for Tuesday’s Michigan primary, but, aided by a fundraising advantage and superior organization, has battled back.
Polls released Friday showed him edging ahead of Santorum in his home state, where he grew up and where his father served as governor.
A Mitchell Research-Rosetta Stone survey showed Romney up in Michigan with 36 percent support from likely voters, followed by Santorum at 33 percent, Rep. Ron Paul (Texas) at 12 percent and Gingrich at 9 percent.
I suspect that future polling will find that Romney isn’t only surging due to his money and organization:
You have to wonder whether Rick Santorum caught Gingrich Disease.
It’s a disease when as soon as you pull ahead you feel you can say anything and it’ll propel you ahead when in reality you start veering out into the Twight Zone (or moon colony) or give the impression that the number one thing you’d want is a time machine.
As he has risen in the polls, Rick Santorum has sounded like Rick Sanctimonious.
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.