I didn't know Rick Santorum is a gambler, but he just got 21... percent of the Republican vote in a post-Iowa Rasmussen national poll. Romney gets 29% and Newt is back at 16%. Paul finished out the lead pack with 12%, with bottom-feeders Perry and Huntsmann each at 4%.
This is an interesting baseline vote. He was bottom-feeding right with Perry and Huntsmann at 4% in national polls before the new year, but he got an instant 17% bump post-Iowa.
The nightmare for conservatives (other than the picky ones, for whom none of the top four thrills them) is that the three-way split of the non-Mitt vote lets Romney slide in with 35% pluralities in winner-take-all settings. Paul isn't going anywhere but a few shuttle trips back to the mothership, so we need to have some sort of settling of that Newt-Santorum split before the winner-take-alls kick in. Between the two, they have 37%, and even a 4% bleed out to Romney (some of the loser's backers might prefer Mitt) would have a 33-33 split.
Dick Morris was on one of the evening Fox talkers (I think O'Reilly-I was surfing in during a bad Pistons loss, honest) saying that Newt needed to take on Santorum. Only if Newt wants to play scorched earth; the two seem to get along and might be a decent ticket. If Newt is as much an ideas-guy has he claims to be, getting a fellow traveler in the White House would be a good concellation prize for a surprisingly effective run so far.
The question to watch is whether people like Santorum when they see him or whether the barrage of attack ads bring him down. When they have pre-NH debates this weekend, he'll be at the adult table for a change, but also open to snipes over the Bridge to Nowhere, the Specter-Toomey primary and other deviations from Tea Party orthodoxy.
Man, has this been a poli-sci geek's dream campaign, with more twists than a Kentucky back road. And we've just had the first votes two days ago.
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