The Republican presidential nominating contest continues to produce endless surprises.
A week ago, the key question was whether victories in two low-turnout caucuses and a “beauty contest” primary would vault Rick Santorum past Newt Gingrich as the latest aspirant to the conservative-alternative-to-Romney mantle. Now, cascading evidence from polls suggest Santorum has become a serious threat to Romney’s status as front-runner, and is a couple more primary wins away from becoming what might be called an existential threat to Mitt’s candidacy.
National polls are now consistently showing Santorum leading, or essentially tied with, Romney among Republican voters. More alarmingly for Romney, the three latest polls taken in Michigan—whose primary will be held on February 28—show Santorum leading there, too, despite a longstanding assumption that Mitt would romp to an easy win in his native state.
While there has been no recent public polling in Arizona, which also holds its primary on February 28, the Santorum Surge has clearly spread to the Super Tuesday (March 6) states. A Quinnipiac poll, for instance, now shows him leading in that day’s biggest state, Ohio, and another survey indicates he’s threatening Newt Gingrich in his own home state of Georgia. An especially dangerous development for Romney is that Santorum is now running ahead of Mitt in at least one major general election poll, calling his longstanding “electability” advantage into question.
All the polls indicate that a key ingredient of the Santorum Surge is relatively high favorable/unfavorable ratios, reflecting his ability to escape significant questioning while Romney and Gingrich (and their super PACs) have pounded each other with negative ads. That is very likely to change, even though conservative opinion-leaders are far more protective of Santorum than of either Romney or Gingrich, and most will not join the fun the way they so often have with the other candidates.
Just today, reports have come out suggesting that Team Romney might execute a multi-state air war against Santorum, attacking him from the Right for votes in the Senate favoring No Child Left Behind and Medicare Rx Drugs. Despite the fact that both were Bush administration initiatives, supported by many Republicans at the time, these programs have now become symbols of big-spending heresy. That line of attack, however, is not all that’s on the horizon. There’s also at least one report that Gingrich’s main super PAC donor, casino mogul Sheldon Adelson, is on the brink of reopening his check book to finance attacks on Santorum, apparently in part because Adelson wouldn’t mind helping Mitt as well as Newt.
All this warlike activity on the GOP side is clearly good news to Democrats. It also comes at an opportune time, just as better economic news and a sharper Obama message has emerged to lift the incumbent’s re-election prospects notably. Obama has led Romney in eight consecutive major general election polls by at least five points. Even more significantly, according to an analysis yesterday by Ron Brownstein based on the latest Pew survey, Obama is now matching his 2008 performance very closely among nearly every key demographic category.
Obama’s stretch of good luck is also extending into individual controversies with the GOP. So far, at least, he seems to have regained an advantage in the battle with Republican politicians and the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops over a proposed employer insurance mandate for contraception coverage. A relatively small modification of the original mandate to require insurers rather than religiously-affiliated institutional employers won the administration praise from an array of Catholic hospital, social-services, and higher-education leaders, frustrating the efforts of the Bishops to speak for Catholic institutions in demanding a complete repeal of the mandate.
And while polling on the subject has varied significantly according to the timing and wording of surveys, it’s reasonably clear Catholic voters’ attitudes on the subject closely track public opinion generally. Meanwhile, as the controversy beings to focus less on broad claims of endangered “religious liberty” and more on attitudes towards the more specific issues of health insurance coverage, Republicans are running the risk of identifying themselves too closely with the Catholic hierarchy’s very unpopular views on contraception.
The current prominence of a presidential candidate, Rick Santorum, who has not been shy about proclaiming his own hostility to contraception, probably does not help – well, at least not the Republicans.
Photo credit: Mark Taylor
