The Buckeye State will be one of the biggest prizes on Super Tuesday, March 6th, and right now Rick Santorum is pulling ahead of Mitt Romney in the state:
Former Pennsylvania Sen. Rick Santorum shoots to the top among Ohio likely Republican primary voters with 36 percent, followed by 29 percent for former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney, according to a Quinnipiac University poll released today. Former House Speaker Newt Gingrich runs third with 20 percent, while Texas U.S. Rep. Ron Paul gets 9 percent.
Three weeks before the March 6 primary, 50 percent of likely Republican primary voters say they might change their mind. This first survey of likely voters can not be compared with earlier surveys of registered Republicans.
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“Sen. Rick Santorum has zoomed to the front of the line among likely voters in Ohio’s March 6 Republican presidential primary,” said Peter A. Brown, assistant director of the Quinnipiac University Polling Institute. “He appears to be riding the momentum from his victories last week in Minnesota, Colorado and Missouri.”
“Unclear is whether that momentum fizzles as happened to Santorum in New Hampshire after winning Iowa, and as happened to Gov. Mitt Romney in South Carolina after winning New Hampshire and Speaker Newt Gingrich in Florida after taking South Carolina,” Brown added.
“For the first time, numerically more voters in Ohio view Romney unfavorably than favorably. His pattern in the earlier primary states has been to use his money advantage to run a large number of negative ads on his biggest challenger. But doing so now risks further increasing Romney’s own unfavorables as a side effect of throwing the mud himself. Yet, Romney may feel the need to raise questions about the lesser-known Santorum in the eyes of GOP voters.”
Romney gets a slightly negative 37 – 40 percent favorability rating from all Ohio registered voters, with a 61 – 25 percent positive from likely Republican primary voters. Santorum, whose overall favorability was 25 – 25 percent in January, is now 35 – 22 percent favorable among all voters and 62 – 7 percent favorable among likely Republican primary voters.
Much of this seems to be a reflection of Santorum’s surge in Michigan and nationally, and it’s likely that the numbers here will depend on how things go there over the next two weeks. There’s not denying, though, that Santorum is surging and that the Romney campaign has something to worry about.
