NASHUA, N.H. — Conservative voters here are deeply split among challengers to Mitt Romney, keeping the former Massachusetts governor in the lead on the eve of the state’s primary despite a lack of entusiasm for the front-runner.
Romney’s poll numbers continued to fall through the weekend, but the GOP’s conservative voting wing appeared poised to scatter its support among several candidates.
“Romney is leading because social conservatives are fractured,” said Richard Land, president of the Southern Baptist Convention’s Ethics & Religious Liberty Commission.
Social and religious conservatives list a variety of reasons why they can’t rally around one candidate.
Texas Gov. Rick Perry entered the race strong, they say, but then stumbled in the debates and has yet to recover, though he has performed better recently and has shown fundraising prowess.
Newt Gingrich, the former House speaker, is viewed as brilliant but “has a penchant for going rogue,” said one religious conservative, citing the Georgian’s history of saying controversial things on a whim.
Now the GOP’s social and religious conservatives are weighing Rick Santorum, the former U.S. senator from Pennsylvania who came up eight votes shy of winning the Iowa caucuses, where evangelical Christians make up more than half of the electorate. Conservatives seem to approve of Santorum but consider him an unknown with a questionable ability to raise money.
“He has not electrified the base until recently and that worries me,” said Tom Hanson, who runs the website southcarolinaconservative.com.
Gingrich and Santorum campaigned around New Hampshire on the eve of the primary, spending most of their time in attacks on Romney.
Rep. Ron Paul, who is securely in second place in New Hampshire, according to poll numbers, doesn’t appeal fully to social conservatives. Even though he is staunchly pro-life and is campaigning for a smaller federal government, his isolationist views on foreign policy are making it harder for him to expand outside a loyal following that makes up about 20 percent of the vote. Social conservatives are also turned off by his plan to legalize drugs.
Gingrich, Perry and Santorum have a combined support much higher than that for Romney.
The divided vote frustrates the GOP’s religious conservative leaders, who huddled this weekend to seek a way to coalesce around a single candidate and defeat Romney.
One participant told The Washington Examiner not to expect the group to rally around a candidate until after the South Carolina primary, however.
“If the voters of South Carolina give a clear preference to one of these three, then it is going to be easier to try to convince social conservatives to back that person at the expense of the candidate they may have previously been working for,” said the participant, who asked not to be identified.
But if the Palmetto State primary fails to crown a socially conservative alternative, the participant said, “then I don’t think you are going to get any kind of unity until it is too late” to stop Romney from getting the nomination.
