A new poll finds former Sen. Rick Santorum is gaining ground in Calfornia, where former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney has been losing ground:
The Republican reluctance to unite behind Mitt Romney as the presidential nominee — which played out from Georgia to North Dakota on Super Tuesday — could become a factor in California, a new poll shows.
A Public Policy Institute of California poll released late Wednesday showed Rick Santorum, who won on Tuesday in North Dakota, Oklahoma and Tennessee, is closing the gap here with Mitt Romney. Newt Gingrich, who won his home state of Georgia, remains in striking distance.
That could bring heavy politicking to the Golden State as the June 5 primary approaches, depending on how the candidates fare in delegate-rich primaries in New York, Pennsylvania and Texas.
“There could be a showdown in California,” PPIC President Mark Baldassare said. “These findings suggest that, like in the rest of the country, we don’t have any clear front-runners here.”
The poll among likely Republican voters had a wide margin of error of 7.4 percentage points. It pegged Romney at 28 percent, Santorum at 22 percent, Newt Gingrich at 17 percent and Ron Paul at 8 percent.Nearly a fourth of voters either were undecided or preferred a different candidate.
Those numbers signal a surge by Santorum and a decline for Romney in California. In December, Santorum barely registered at 4 percent. In January, his support rose to 15 percent.
Romney has lost 9 points since a 37 percent showing in January.
I still think Romney is going to win in the end. It would be a shocker if he didn’t. But it is looking as if it’ll shape up in the way that some have now started to describe it: as a hostile takeover.
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.