For Republican presidential hopeful Rick Santorum, late April’s lineup of East Coast primaries could prove devastating to his bid to rack up convention delegates, but no contest looms more threatening for the former U.S. senator than the one in his home state of Pennsylvania.
Santorum’s once-healthy lead over front-runner Mitt Romney in the Keystone State has all but disappeared ahead of the April 24 vote, a Franklin and Marshall College poll revealed Wednesday. The poll showed Romney trailing Santorum by 2 percentage points, a statistical tie and a significant drop from the 14-point lead Santorum had earlier this month. Rep. Ron Paul of Texas and former House Speaker Newt Gingrich had only single-digit support in the poll.
While Santorum remains even with Romney, the trend is devastating news for Santorum, who represented Pennsylvania in the House and Senate. Most political observers believe Santorum must win his home state decisively to remain a viable challenger to Romney.
“This is not just a state where Santorum lived, it’s a state he represented in Congress for 16 years,” Franklin and Marshall poll Director G. Terry Madonna told The Washington Examiner. “He’s got to have a substantial win here. If it’s a close election, he loses.”
Madonna said Pennsylvanians are very similar voters to those in industrial states that have already voted in the Republican contest — including Michigan, Ohio and Illinois — and Romney won all three of those, mainly with the support of wealthier voters focused on economic issues.
A third of Pennsylvania’s voters are independents, and many of the Republicans are economic conservatives, not the social conservatives who have been more supportive of Santorum.
“Santorum is suffering from the same problem that has befallen him in these other industrial states,” Madonna said.
Besides Pennsylvania, Connecticut, Delaware, New York and Rhode Island will vote April 24 and none has the kind of evangelical or ultraconservative electorate that helped Santorum win elsewhere, mainly in the South.
But a loss for Santorum would be particularly damaging in Pennsylvania given that voters rejected his bid for a third Senate term in 2006 by an 18-point margin.
John Morningstar, who heads the Tea Party of Bradford County in Northern Pennsylvania, said Santorum’s 2006 loss isn’t his biggest liability right now.
“I think Santorum is slipping in the polls because he’s not talking about the issues people care about,” Morningstar said. “He’s talking about social issues when people are more concerned about unemployment, skyrocketing spending going on in D.C. and the debt.”
Hogan Gidley, a top aide to Santorum, told The Examiner on Wednesday that the campaign isn’t worrying about polls and pointed out that while Santorum has been greatly outspent by Romney he managed to beat Romney in 11 states, including Alabama, Mississippi and, most recently, Louisiana.
“We saw polls the day before Mississippi and Alabama that said Romney was going to win both those states by 8 points and that didn’t happen,” Gidley said.
Gidley declined to declare Pennsylvania a “must win” primary for Santorum.
“But we want to do really well here, obviously,” Gidley said. “It’s his home state.”
