Collision 2012 by Dan Balz

Author:Dan Balz
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Publisher: Penguin Group US
Published: 2013-08-06T04:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 17

Santorum’s Challenge

Rick Santorum was an also-ran in the New Hampshire primary. Newt Gingrich and Mitt Romney buried him in South Carolina. Santorum bailed out of Florida, leaving Romney and Gingrich to fight it out there. He ignored Nevada and finished in last place. It was a measure of how strange the Republican contest was that after all that, Santorum was poised for a dramatic reentry into the top ranks of the race. He did it three days after Nevada with victories in Missouri, Minnesota, and Colorado, contests in which not a single delegate was actually awarded. Missouri held a beauty contest primary, a mere popularity vote. Gingrich had not even bothered to get on the ballot, and Romney didn’t waste time campaigning there. Minnesota and Colorado held caucuses, the first tentative steps in a lengthy process that eventually would award delegates to the national convention. Santorum saw the three states as an opportunity to get back in the competition. His rebound became one more improbable plot twist in a contest that continued to defy every expert’s predictions. With those three victories, he became Romney’s principal and last significant challenger.

No one had any fixed expectations about the three contests on February 7. They were on the calendar but seen as an interlude in the Republican race, way stations en route to the more significant events in Michigan and Arizona three weeks later. The odds makers gave Santorum a modest chance to pull an upset in Minnesota, if only because the electorate in caucuses was likely to be small and very conservative. Romney, however, was a solid favorite in Colorado, where he had captured 60 percent of the vote in the 2008 caucuses. His team was so confident about the state that on the morning of the caucuses, Rich Beeson, Romney’s political director and a Coloradoan, guaranteed victory to the others. The campaign’s final numbers put Romney solidly in first, with Santorum and Gingrich splitting most of the rest of the vote. But Gingrich’s support was in a state of collapse in Colorado on caucus day, thanks to the fallout from the former Speaker’s rambling late-night press conference in Las Vegas.

Cable networks, accustomed to the excitement of primary and caucus nights over the first four weeks of the year, were fully prepared for another night of counting and instant analysis, no matter that these were events that in past years would have drawn little attention. For Santorum, it was a godsend. Missouri’s results came in first that evening, and the former Pennsylvania senator was quickly declared the winner. In head-to-head competition, he had defeated the front-runner by 55 to 25 percent. Next came Minnesota and another big Santorum victory. This was instantly interpreted as a sign of further dissatisfaction with Romney among conservatives and, given his performance there four years earlier, an embarrassment. Had Santorum won only those two, the damage to Romney might have been minimal. The big blow was Colorado. Romney’s team watched it slip away all day as

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