Conservative leaders, increasingly concerned that the Republican Party is about to nominate a presidential candidate too moderate for their tastes, met with Rick Santorum in Tysons Corner on Thursday to work out a plan to beat front-runner Mitt Romney.
Their game plan: Find a way to convince Newt Gingrich to drop out of the nominating race so his supporters can coalesce behind Santorum and boost the former Pennsylvania senator over Romney.
Santorum is the top choice of many so-called Reagan conservatives including Gary Bauer, head of the pro-life group Campaign for Working Families, former Heritage Foundation official Rebecca Hagelin and conservative activist Richard Viguerie.
But Santorum is running second to Romney in most polls and is far behind Romney in the race for convention delegates following Romney’s sweep of this week’s primaries in Maryland, the District and Wisconsin.
Gingrich, meanwhile is polling in low single digits and won just 6 percent of the vote in the Wisconsin primary. The way top conservatives figure it, if Gingrich had gotten out of the race, those votes could have gone to Santorum, which would have left him virtually tied with Romney.
“From what I understand, conservative leaders from across this country met with Rick in an effort to explain they were going to ratchet up the drumbeat for Newt to get out,” an aide with knowledge of the meeting told The Washington Examiner.
But Gingrich has no intention of quitting and there are no plans for the former House speaker to work with Santorum to defeat Romney.
“There will be no joint efforts,” Gingrich spokesman R.C. Hammond told The Examiner.
Hammond called the idea of Gingrich leaving the race to help Santorum “pie in the sky thinking.”
Bauer was one of the eight conservatives who met with Santorum on Thursday. He told The Examiner he could not disclose the strategy discussed by the group but said the consensus is “Santorum would be a much stronger candidate than the front-runner” in the fall campaign against President Obama.
Bauer said the meeting “was about how to get Santorum from here to the goal, which is the nomination.”
The timing could not be more critical. The next round of primaries on April 24, including a must-win contest in Santorum’s home state of Pennsylvania, could either revive Santorum’s campaign or bring it to an end.
Santorum, his top campaign aides concede, must win big in the Keystone State to keep his campaign alive, even though polls show Romney has already cut into Santorum’s lead in Pennsylvania. A Rasmussen Reports poll shows Santorum ahead by 4 percentage points, while a survey by Public Policy Polling has Romney ahead by 5 points. In both polls, Gingrich garnered 6 percent of the vote.
Bauer, who ran for president in 2000, said he has not asked Gingrich to exit the race and acknowledged there is no guarantee every Gingrich vote would go to Santorum, though the two appeal to the party’s most conservative voters.
“I think it goes without saying,” Bauer said, “that if it was one-on-one, Santorum versus Romney, I think it would be a very interesting close to this nomination battle.”
