Politics is a cruel mistress. Three weeks ago, Rick Santorum was fresh off convincing wins in three states, rising in the national polls, and out of nowhere was leading Mitt Romney by double digits in his home state of Michigan. Once again, the talk of new candidates entering the race, and signs of panic from leading Republicans, were all over the news. Even after a fairly strong debate performance, the Romney campaign seemed to be floundering and the candidate continued on his grand tradition of verbal gaffes that tended to reinforce the idea that he was out of touch. At the same time, though Rick Santorum seemed to be getting distracted himself. Instead of sticking to the economic message that had served him so well in Iowa, and which seemed tailor made for a state like Michigan, he was talking about culture war issues like contraception and saying that President Kennedy’s famous 1960 speech on religion and politics made him want to vomit. Had he stuck to an economic message, one wonders what might have happened.
E.J. Dionne doesn’t wonder at all, and argues that Santorum blew it by bringing out his inner culture warrior:
Rick Santorum’s speech after the Michigan primary Tuesday night was the longest apology to working women and college graduates in the history of political campaigns — partly because no candidate has had to apologize to working women and college graduates before. Santorum went on and on about his professional mom and his professional wife and spoke with respect for their work outside as well as inside the home. It’s always said that first you have to recognize your problem, so Santorum took a big step tonight.
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But was it too late? Mitt Romney survived. His margin in Michigan was thin and exit polls showed he continued to have problems with the staunchest conservatives and evangelical Christians. But he won the race he had to win. Had he lost tonight, his campaign would have imploded.
And that shows what a lost opportunity Michigan was for Santorum. He had a real chance of winning Michigan and throwing Romney’s campaign into chaos. He went ahead in the polls after his trifecta of victories in Minnesota, Missouri and Colorado. But he couldn’t close the deal. And women were the key to his defeat. The two candidates ran close to even among men; most of Romney’s margin came from women. A victory tonight would have established Santorum as the unquestioned leader of the Republican right. Now, he will have to continue to fight to fend off Newt Gingrich for that honor.
Dionne has a good point here. A win in Michigan, even by a narrow margin, would have been a huge psychic boost for Santorum’s shoestring campaign (the Santorum campaign has no national office, for example) going into Super Tuesday and the March primaries. Dionne is also correct that women were significant part of Santorum’s loss last night. According to the exit polls, Santorum lost women in Michigan by 5 points and by 17 points in Arizona. Looking specifically at Michigan, Patricia Murphy argues that Santorum has nobody to blame but himself for his troubles:
Santorum’s loss came after weeks of talking about issues that did him no favors with the moderate and independent women who voted Tuesday, including his past statements that working women had been convinced by “radical feminists” that working outside the home is the only route to happiness, that Barack Obama is a “snob” for advocating that high-school students go on to postgraduate training or college, and his opposition to contraception and abortion under any circumstances.
Although Santorum has insisted that his religious beliefs about contraception would not influence public policy, he argued Sunday that the Founders never intended a complete separation of church and state, especially on questions of morality—not an easy sell to the 39 percent of voters Tuesday who said they were moderate or liberal.
How different might things have been had Rick Santorum campaigned in Michigan the way he had in Iowa, where he stuck to a large degree to a working class message that he abandoned for some reason the moment he won Iowa. Given the economic climate in the Wolverine State, there’s every reason to believe that it’s a message that would have been received far better than the culture war nonsense. Instead of going there, however, Santorum responded to his rise in the polls over the past three weeks by becoming exactly what his critics on the left and the right have always said he was, an intolerant spokesperson for the most intolerant branch of social conservatism. Even if that managed to only turn off a small percentage of Michigan voters, it was probably enough to cost him a victory that would have changed the tenor of this race forever.
Instead, he came in second. Yes, he can claim that he came within three percentage points of Mitt Romney in his home state, and he’ll walk away with some delegates from Michigan, but as far as the long-term goes this was not a development that was in Santorum’s best interests. Now, we move on to Super Tuesday. Santorum is likely to pick up a win or two there — Oklahoma and Tennessee seem to be his best chances right now, and he’s competitive with Newt Gingrich in Georgia — but the big battleground for the next week will be Ohio. Right now, Santorum is leading in the polls in the Buckeye State but those numbers are likely to tighten in response to the outcome in Michigan. Additionally, the Romney campaign’s superior organization and superior money will likely benefit it greatly in a state the size of Ohio where having a presence in at least five media markets (Cleveland, Columbus, Cincinnati, Dayton, and Toledo) is a must. More importantly, though, even if Santorum gets the most votes in Ohio, he’s unlikely to get the most delegates:
All six major GOP candidates have been certified and will appear on the Ohio ballot, according to a list released by the Ohio secretary of state’s office today. But Rick Santorum, the release said, did not file delegates in the 6th, 9th or 13th congressional districts — and loses his chance at getting any delegates in those districts.
Forty-eight of the state’s 66 delegates are awarded proportionally based on the vote in each congressional district — three per district — and the remaining 18 delegates are awarded based on the at-large vote statewide. That means that while Santorum can get votes toward the at-large total in those three districts, he has no shot at taking a share of the nine total delegates those districts will award.
And in Virginia, of course, Santorum isn’t even on the ballot so there’s another 49 delegates that he won’t even be able to get a few of. A month from now, we may be looking back on Michigan as the moment that the Santorum campaign, such as it is, reached its zenith. If that’s the case, then the candidate’s own inability to stay on a message that could well have resounded with the state’s blue collar voters is going to be the main reason why he failed.
