A senior advisor to Rick Santorum confirmed Sunday afternoon that the campaign recently canceled an early afternoon event today in Concord, N.H., so that Rick could spend more time campaigning in South Carolina.
Santorum had already made plans to campaign in South Carolina this afternoon before his surprise second-place finish in Iowa. But his New Hampshire co-chair, Bill Cahill, confirmed to The Examiner that Santorum decided to leave the Granite state earlier than planned to spend more time campaigning in South Carolina, where polls show him a more viable challenger to Former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney. Cahill said he wasn’t sure when Santorum’s event was officially canceled this week, but it probably happened yesterday.
Santorum left New Hampshire for South Carolina – where he has three events today – immediately after this morning’s NBC-Facebook debate and will return to Manchester tonight around 11pm. He is scheduled to appear at an event in New Hampshire bright and early tomorrow morning at 7am.
Cahill acknowledged that a New Hampshire win on Tuesday is not ‘realistic.’
“Let’s be realistic here – Mitt Romney’s been at forty percent for five years,” he said. Today’s Suffolk Tracking Poll has Mitt Romney winning the state with 35 percent of the vote, down from 39 percent in yesterday’s poll.
Ron Paul polled in a distant second at 20 percent, while Santorum came in sixth place at eight percent, beating only Rick Perry and Buddy Roemer, both of whom are polling at one percent.
Cahill said a fourth place finish or above in New Hampshire would be acceptable to the Santorum campaign. He said the campaign has had a three-state plan from the very beginning – Iowa, New Hampshire and South Carolina – and that has not changed.
