How Rick Santorum Could Disrupt the 2016 GOP Race
Rick Santorum has shifted his focus.
Santorum is announcing his candidacy for the presidency today outside of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. The former Pennsylvania senator was considered a rising Republican star before getting trounced in the 2006 election, but he made a surprise showing in the 2012 presidential primaries. Emphasizing a message of social conservatism, he ended up finishing second to Mitt Romney. He won the primaries of 11 states.
Things are different this time. There are so many candidates in the GOP field they aren’t sure how to run the debates. Santorum, though, has a new emphasis. To differentiate himself from the other social conservatives in the race, he is rebranding himself as something of an economic populist.
He even has a jangly pop-country theme song.
Santorum has always played up his grandson-of-a-coal-miner roots, obviously. But the Wall Street Journal reports Santorum will make it a more explicit focus in this race. Last year, Santorum wrote a book titled Blue Collar Conservatives that argued the GOP could recapture working class votes.
“In 2012, a mass of blue collar voters, enough to have tipped the balance of the electoral college in favor of the Republican candidate, simply stayed home on election day,” the book’s description reads. “Why? Despite their deeply conservative values, they had lost faith that the Republicans spoke for them and had their backs.” He is no liberal, but he has written of workers’ rights, has questioned free trade bills and has even decried the lack of prosecutions stemming from the financial fallout.
It doesn’t even matter if Santorum is even all that populist — he just needs to act a bit more populist than the other candidates. Santorum has low poll numbers currently, and there are more social conservatives in this year’s field. But he has polled well before, and could have some successes convincing voters with an anti-corporate, pro-working class message.
Elected to Congress in 1990, Santorum was the only candidate from the Gang of Seven to move up to a higher office. He served two terms in the Senate and received solid ratings from fiscal conservative groups. But though he quickly rose to become the third-highest ranking Republican in the Senate, his support began to erode. His comments about gays and lesbians led Dan Savage to go on a high-profile campaign to coin “the frothy mixture of lube and fecal matter that is sometimes the by-product of anal sex” as santorum. He spent much of his 2006 re-election campaign dealing with questions ranging from his social conservatism (in a state known for moderates) to where his children lived (Virginia, it seemed) to a scandal involving the National Weather Service. He lost.
He was probably never really a factor in 2012, but he did emerge as the survivor of Romney’s (many) challengers. He faces an uphill battle again this time. Some voters will look at his previous comments and label him unelectable in a general election. “A RealClearPolitics average of five recent polls found him ranking 10th among those eyeing his party’s nomination, with 2.3% of the vote,” the WSJ’s Rebecca Ballhaus writes. “What’s more, Mr. Santorum in his second presidential campaign is already known to voters, whereas other fresher faces may have more room to grow in the polls as Americans learn more about them.” The New York Times reported Iowa social conservatives may seem to favor Mike Huckabee — who also strikes a populist tone.
Okay, so it’s a long shot. But Santorum could, incredibly, draw the race in a more populist direction. Santorum could strike a different tone than that of candidates opposed to, say, organized labor. He might not win, but he might throw a monkey wrench into the race.
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