I think that one of the things that made the 2012 presidential election so unusual was that there was a very large, persistent plurality of people on the right who could not stand Mitt Romney and wanted anyone else to be their nominee. It wasn’t so much that it was unheard of for the frontrunner to attract less than a majority in the early primaries. That’s actually a common occurrence when there are a lot of candidates to choose from. The novelty was that there really wasn’t anyone who was ever seen as an alternative to Romney. So, what happened was that voters kept shifting their support to one anti-Romney candidate after another, but they never really cared for any of his alternatives either. It’s not like people loved Newt Gingrich, Herman Cain, Michele Bachmann, and Rick Santorum and then fell out of love with them. What happened is that they hated Romney so much that they refused to say that they would vote for him, and so they kind of flocked to someone else until the glare of the resulting media attention caused that alternative to look hopeless and ridiculous.
Rick Santorum was probably the least palatable candidate running in the race, which is why he was the absolute last alternative people chose to Romney. The base of the right tasted everything else on the sampling platter before they picked up Santorum and took a bite. But, like a game of musical chairs, the music stopped at just that moment and Santorum wound up being the hot anti-Romney candidate when the first contest occurred in Iowa. The result was a narrow loss for Santorum that wound up being counted as a win later on when it didn’t matter. In the end, Ron Paul collected most of Santorum’s delegates because Santorum had no organization on the ground in the Hawkeye State.
Still, the strong showing in Iowa eventually turned Santorum into the only semi-viable alternative to Romney and he began winning some contests, particularly in caucus states. This left him as the second place finisher which is usually a commanding position for a Republican politician. Some examples: Poppy Bush was second in 1980 and the nominee in 1988; Dole was second in 1988 and the nominee in 1996; McCain was second in 2000 and the nominee in 2008, and Romney was second in 2008 and the nominee in 2012.
If history is a guide, Santorum should be considered a very serious contender for the 2016 nomination, and he’s certainly aware of this. Yet, he might get excluded from the first Fox News debate because he’s polling slightly below genital warts. And this is eating him up. He looks at the history and he thinks he has a good chance and should be treated accordingly. And he makes a couple of good arguments.
“I’m probably the best person to comment on this. In January of 2012 I was at 4 percent in the national polls, and I won the Iowa caucuses. I don’t know if I was last in the polls, but I was pretty close to last,” Santorum said. “And so the idea that a national poll has any relationship to the viability of a candidate—ask Rudy Giuliani that. Ask Phil Gramm that. You can go on down the list of folks who were doing real well in national polls and didn’t win a single state and were not a viable candidate.”
…”If you’re a United States senator, if you’re a governor, if you’re a woman who ran a Fortune 500 company, and you’re running a legitimate campaign for president, then you should have a right to be on stage with everybody else,” Santorum said. “So the idea that we’re going to arbitrarily—and it’s arbitrary, someone at 1.15 is in, someone at 1.14 is out—that to me is not a rational way.”
Santorum, who started the 2012 race a rounding-error away from zero in the polls to finish as the runner-up to Mitt Romney for the GOP nomination, was particularly upset about the network’s decision to use national polls, “which is not legitimate, in my opinion, to determine viability of a candidate,” he said.
I sympathize with Santorum on this, but what he’s missing is that no one ever really liked him while there were plenty of people who sincerely liked Poppy, Dole, McCain, and even Romney in the years in which they came up second best. Santorum’s success was entirely explained by a combination of Romney’s persistent unpopularity and the pure luck of being the last choice of everyone as an alternative to Romney.
Santorum thinks he almost won, which isn’t true and is made obvious when you realize that he didn’t even get to keep most of the few delegates he actually earned. Santorum thinks he was well-liked by the people who voted for him, but he wasn’t. They expressed a preference for every single other candidate in the race before they settled on him. He was literally, the people’s last choice. It’s just that the other candidates peaked too soon, before the voters actually went to the polls and caucuses.
Without Romney being shoved down an unwilling right’s throat, there is no appetite for Santorum.
And it says something about Romney that there was ever a time when people actually had an appetite for Santorum.
I mean, I’d certainly rather have genital warts.
