USA TODAY International Edition
Santorum aims to head Romney off at the pass
Hopes to lay conservative claim on today’s contests
GOLDEN, Colo. — Former Pennsylvania senator Rick Santorum has spent the past few days shuttling among Minnesota, Missouri and Colorado hoping that a good showing in one or all of today’s Republican contests would show the conservative electorate was not solidly behind former Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney.
“Our hope is conservatives are stepping back and looking at the race and making the same calculations that I’ve just made that a Romney nomination will not be in the best interest of us winning the general election,” Santorum said here Monday. “We need to have a conservative alternative, and my feeling is that ( former House speaker Newt) Gingrich has sort of had his chance in the arena and came up short in Florida and Nevada, and now it’s our turn.”
Santorum downplayed his chances in today’s caucuses in Minnesota and Colorado and a nonbinding primary in Missouri, but a recent poll in Minnesota showed him narrowly leading Romney there.
Santorum said Romney will likely “underperform” in Colorado, which he won with 60% of the vote in the state’s 2008 caucuses.
Santorum also objected to comments from Romney supporters in Colorado who say only Romney can beat President Obama. They are “flat wrong,” Santorum said, adding that the health care plan Romney backed in Massachusetts makes him vulnerable in a general election.
Perhaps as telling as the sparse polling in the states voting today was the Romney campaign’s renewed focus on Santorum.
Romney’s campaign sent out several e- mails attacking Santorum’s record in Congress and conducted a conference call in which supporters criticized Santorum for supporting earmarks while in Congress.
The Romney campaign also sent out a copy of the 2008 release when Santorum endorsed Romney for president.
Santorum’s campaign responded with a news release reading, “Santorum Surge Prompts Romney to Use Attack Machine.”
Another change in tone toward Santorum came from former Gingrich, who backed off his earlier calls for Santorum to drop out of the race so conservatives would consolidate around him.
Santorum, Gingrich said Monday, “would have a pretty good day tomorrow.”
“And he will have earned it,” he said. “He targeted differently than I did,” Gingrich said. Instead of campaigning heavily in expensive Florida for last week’s primary, as Gingrich did, Santorum spent his time elsewhere.
“Rick gets to do whatever Rick wants to do,” Gingrich said. “He’s a free agent.”
Any delegates that go to Santorum or Rep. Ron Paul, R- Texas, are those that won’t go to Romney, Gingrich said. “Between us, we are actually in the process of stopping the front- runner,” he said.
For Gingrich, the next stop in the fight to stop Romney will be in Ohio, where he said he hopes to take advantage of early voting there. He said he learned a lesson in that from Florida.
“Forty percent of the vote in Florida was cast before the primary,” which makes campaigning early more important, Gingrich said.
Also, Colorado will not actually award any delegates today, so the candidates have a chance to win delegates when they are awarded in the spring during local and state conventions, said Tom Lucero, Gingrich’s Colorado spokesman.