As Rick Santorum spoke to the Conservative Political Action Conference Friday in Maryland, members of the audience were streaming out the door.
It was bad luck that Santorum had been picked to follow Sen. Rand Paul of Kentucky, who is each year the biggest draw at CPAC — and attracts supporters on the opposite end of the Republican spectrum from Santorum’s troops.
But even after the audience exodus had ended, Santorum’s speech remained off-key.
“The Kenyan government is actually developing proof that Barack Obama was actually born in America,” Santorum said in a memorable moment, to anemic chuckles.
In many ways, watching Santorum can feel like a throwback to 2012, when a birther joke might have made sense, and when Santorum was for much of the race viewed as an also-ran — until he emerged as the socially conservative alternative to Mitt Romney starting with an unlikely and narrow victory in the Iowa caucuses.
Now, instead of starting this presidential campaign as the heir apparent to the nomination, as a former second-place finisher might, Santorum is again an underdog: Polling in the low single digits nationally, as he was at this stage in the 2012 cycle, networking at full speed, and scraping for any real estate in the crowded Republican primary field ahead of 2016.
In the early evening Friday, Santorum looked exhausted as he snacked on Keebler cheese and peanut butter sandwich crackers in his family’s suite overlooking the gray Potomac River. Before he sat down to speak with the Washington Examiner, he had already given his speech to CPAC, held a town hall with conference attendees, taken questions from the press, and participated in a number of other one-on-one interviews. Afterward, Santorum would attend the Reagan Dinner featuring keynote speaker Gov. Mike Pence.
It’s no wonder he’s tired: Santorum hasn’t stopped running for president since 2012. He conceded to Romney in April 2012; in June of that year, Santorum announced he was starting a group called Patriot Voices. Santorum’s team says the committee has brought in $10 million in the past two years alone and currently has 21 people on staff.
“I was just asked on Bloomberg, when are you going to start to staff up?” Santorum said. “Unlike these other folks, we’ve actually had an organization.”
But if Santorum has grown his political organization substantially since his last race, his path to victory is less clear as he faces a primary field likely to be composed of successful governors and high-profile senators, many of them fresh faces. He has also lost some key staffers from 2012 to other campaigns, including Chuck Laudner, who ran his Iowa operation, and Hogan Gidley, his former communications director.
Asked what niche he mightpropel his candidacy in the 2016 field, Santorum said he intends to build off of his successes in 2012 among dogerblue-collar voters.
That demographic was indeed a key ingredient to Santorum’s surprisingly strong performance in Iowa in 2012. After the election, Santorum said, Romney’s campaign told him he had consistently thrown off their polling, because the vast majority of his supporters turned out to the polls after 5 p.m.
“Who votes after work? Not business owners, not folks who have a flexible schedule, but folks who work in salaried jobs,” Santorum said. “Those are the folks who vote overwhelmingly later in the evening. Those were my voters.”
“So, I think that’s where we start,” Santorum added. “When I look at this race and look and see where everybody else is and look at what else is going on, I realize we’ll probably be the only person in the race for a minimum wage increase. We’ll probably be the only person in this race that’s for scaling back legal immigration.”
Santorum also hopes to carve out a space on foreign policy and national security, issues that many Republicans anticipate will be at the forefront during this presidential election. In the Senate, Santorum served on the armed services and foreign relations committees, credentials he often cites.
But Santorum’s path is even more clear-cut than that — he hopes.
“I fit in to the winner column,” Santorum grinned. “Should I run, that’s the niche I hope to occupy.”
