Santorum’s Last Stand or Romney’s Time to Seal the Deal?

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Mar 23

CHICAGO – Basking in the glow of his commanding win in Illinois on Tuesday night, Mitt Romney delivered his victory speech in Schaumburg, Ill., but it may be another? state 40 miles north? that?once and for all seals the deal for the GOP front-runner: Wisconsin.

While Romney focused his?victory speech on a general election showdown with President Obama and his top strategist Eric Fehrnstrom called on other candidates to “step aside,” the Republican primary seems destined to continue at least through April 3, when Wisconsin, along with Maryland and the District of Columbia, heads to the polls. It is there that Romney will have a real chance to end what has been a long, drawn-out primary.

With a 300 delegate lead over his closest rival, Rick Santorum – 563 to 263 – Romney, as evidenced by his speech in Schaumburg, is eager to focus his attacks on Obama rather than his fellow Republican hopefuls. Romney’s resounding triumph in Illinois – he took 47 percent of the vote compared?with 35 percent for Santorum, a difference of more than 100,000 votes – gives the former Massachusetts governor a compelling argument for Santorum, Newt Gingrich and Ron Paul to exit the race. But not one of the three has shown any inclination to do so. Gingrich and Paul, at this point, have become irrelevant in the primary, but Santorum still holds out faint hope of making a comeback.?If he is to pull that off,? he has to score an unexpected victory in the very near future.

?Santorum, it seems, will likely win in Louisiana on Saturday, but that will do little to change the momentum of the race. Come April 3, the former Pennsylvania senator will be hard-pressed to find a lot of support in Maryland and is not even on the ballot in D.C. After that, the next round of primaries does not take place until April 24, when New York, Connecticut, Delaware, Rhode Island and Pennsylvania all vote. Only Pennsylvania is? remotely friendly territory for Santorum, but even?there the voters ?kicked him out of the Senate after?one term. It’s not exactly a great home-field advantage.

That all makes April 3 in Wisconsin the last best chance for Santorum to get back into the race. Win the Badger State and Santorum will be back in the conversation, at least until April 24. Lose, and he will merely be an afterthought going forward, a dead man walking. Santorum will waste little time in making his case to Wisconsin voters. He heads there Saturday to address a conference in Milwaukee. Romney is also expected to visit the state later this month, while his wife, Ann, will campaign in Madison and Milwaukee on Thursday.

If past is prologue, Santorum will know that the road ahead is an uphill climb. In the past three Midwestern states to vote – Illinois, Ohio and Michigan – Santorum has suffered crucial defeats. In each state, Romney had better organization and far more money, a lethal combination for his rivals. In Illinois, for instance, Santorum failed to qualify for the ballot in four of the state’s 18 congressional districts and was outspent by an eight to?one ?margin statewide and a 21 to one margin in the Chicago area. Making matters worse, Santorum did himself no favors by declaring that he did not care about the unemployment rate – this in a state where the jobless rate is a full point higher than the national average. What had once appeared to be a close race in Illinois ended up being anything but.

?Romney and his allies have already started to flex their financial muscle in Wisconsin. His super PAC – Restore Our Future – has bought around $1.3 million worth of airtime in the state, with ads on the air dating back to March 15. The Santorum campaign, by contrast, has? shelled out only $54,000 in Wisconsin to date, and his super PAC – the Red, White and Blue Fund – has yet to spend a dime there.

That does not bode well for Santorum’s chances in a state that has 42 delegates on offer and the potential to snuff out any hope he has of pulling off a shocking upset. Another factor working against him is that Romney is viewed as the favorite in Waukesha County, a wealthy, educated area just to the west of Milwaukee. Romney so far has used his strength in the most urban areas of Illinois, Michigan and Ohio to catapult him to statewide victories. In Illinois, it was the Chicago area. In Michigan, around Detroit. And in Ohio, Cleveland, Cincinnati and Columbus. In Wisconsin next month, Romney will hope to replicate that magic in Milwaukee and Madison.

Do not be surprised if he succeeds. And if Romney does take the Badger State – as well as D.C. and Maryland that same day – then it will be fair to declare the GOP race over once and for all, even if Santorum, Gingrich ?and Paul continue to argue otherwise.

Matthew Jaffe is covering the 2012 campaign for ABC News and Univision.

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Source: http://news.yahoo.com/santorums-last-stand-romneys-time-seal-deal-100024733–abc-news.html

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Mitt Romney’s disastrous week ends with collapse in national polls

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Jan 26

Poll numbers for Mitt Romney aren’t falling just in Florida. Newt Gingrich is the new top choice among likely Republican voters nationally, the latest Gallup tracking poll shows.?

It’s been a rough week for Mitt Romney.

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His debates in South Carolina went poorly. He lost a primary by 12 percentage points that he had thought would be his. A trio of polls over the weekend showed him in a freefall in Florida relative to Newt Gingrich, despite pumping millions of advertising dollars into the state. His income tax returns, finally released, left him open to mockery about his 14 percent tax rate and offshore investments.

And now national polls seem to be going the way of the Florida polls.

The Gallup daily tracking poll ? a five-day rolling average ? put Mr. Gingrich on top among Republican voters, 31 percent to Mr. Romney’s 27 percent, for the first time in well over a month on Tuesday. It’s a massive change from the 23-point lead Romney enjoyed just over a week ago.

A Rasmussen poll, meanwhile, also showed Gingrich way up nationally, with 35 percent among likely GOP voters to Romney’s 28 percent. “Support for Gingrich has jumped a total of 19 points in two surveys since early January, while Romney’s support has held steady in that same period,” the report says.

(In both polls, Rick Santorum and Ron Paul are registering in the low double-digits.)

It’s clear the polls are changing, rapidly. On Monday, Gallup’s national poll showed Romney and Gingrich in a statistical tie ? itself a big shift from the previous week. In a campaign that has been notable since the summer for its rapid and large shifts in poll results, the first few contests have done nothing to change that.

In a blog Monday night, Gallup pollster Frank Newport wrote: “Gingrich and Romney continue to exchange the lead in the race for the Republican presidential nomination, not unlike the final quarter of a close championship football game. The most obvious implication of this back and forth is Romney’s failure to consolidate and sustain his support among Republicans nationally. The virtual evaporation of Romney’s 20-plus-point lead over the last week suggests that Republicans most certainly have not settled on the former Massachusetts governor as their final choice for the nominee. The fact that Gingrich has managed to resurrect his standing in the polls once again suggests that Republicans have most certainly not ruled him out.”

In both polls, conservative Republicans have been key to Gingrich’s resurgence. Gallup’s numbers, for instance, show that in the two weeks of mid-January, Gingrich’s support among conservatives grew from 16 percent to 28 percent, while Romney’s support among that same group fell from 36 percent to 28 percent.

Similarly, the Rasmussen poll shows Gingrich favored heavily by voters who consider themselves tea party Republicans, very conservative, or evangelical Christians.

Rasmussen also shows that voters’ perception of the race is changing.

Last week, 70 percent of all likely GOP voters believed that Romney would eventually be the nominee. That figure has now dropped to just 51 percent, while 32 percent believe Gingrich will be the nominee (up from 13 percent a week ago).

Stand by. There’s always next week.?

Source: http://rss.csmonitor.com/~r/feeds/csm/~3/07pBh3xyMa4/Mitt-Romney-s-disastrous-week-ends-with-collapse-in-national-polls

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