Santorum Surge: It’s Real and Spectacular

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For the past three weeks I’ve been wondering: Is it just me? Am I imagining things, or does Rick Santorum have a legitimate chance of scoring an upset in the Iowa GOP caucuses? Robert Costa of National Review today unloads 2,000 words of solid reporting on the subject, a few excerpts of which I’ll highlight:

Sweat equity can do a lot in Iowa, where Santorum has visited all 99 counties — but in this cycle, with the polls fluctuating each week, nothing is guaranteed. His strategy, his wish, is that “slow and steady wins the race.”
“We just believe that the work we’ve done, our respect for the process in Iowa, holding 349 town-hall meetings, will matter as people start making their decisions,” Santorum says. . . .
Beyond his shoestring operation, the backing of prominent social conservatives is playing an important, often behind-the-scenes role in bolstering his quiet winter surge. Bob Vander Plaats, who heads the Family Leader, a social-conservative group, endorsed Santorum on Tuesday, as did Chuck Hurley, the director of the Iowa Family Policy Center. These high-profile reinforcements add heft to Santorum’s evangelical bloc in Iowa, which already included “well-connected and influential pastors like Cary Gordon of Sioux City, Terry Amann of Des Moines, and Albert Calaway of Indianola,” according to The Iowa Republican. . . .
Spending time, rather than money, has its benefits.
“A lot of pastors come to town-hall meetings,” Santorum says, and they, like most Iowans, want to know where a candidate stands on moral issues. By running an accessible, lightly staffed campaign, Santorum has been able to meet hundreds of religious leaders, all of whom coordinate networks, be it a prayer group or big-city congregation. . . .
“We’ve spent a lot of time in towns that the other candidates simply have not,” Santorum says. Bachmann and Texas governor Rick Perry, he acknowledges, are gaining notice this week for bus tours around the state and could see their own sparks. But his campaign has not “rushed,” trying to hit all 99 counties within days, sprinting toward the finish line, he says. “We spent time early on and it wasn’t a 15-minute stop, it was one hour or two hours,” he adds. “Going to the county dinners in Osceola County and Lyon County, up in the northwest corner, these tiny counties, has been important. We spent three hours up there and then had drinks after dinner.”
“The beautiful thing about Iowa is that you can’t buy Iowa,” Santorum says. “We’ve seen some other candidates spend millions of dollars on ads and then not move in the polls. . . .”

You can read the whole thing at NRO, but they do that annoying multi-page thing where you have to keep clicking at the bottom, so you might prefer the everything-on-one-page print-friendly version.

The “under-the-radar” aspect of a campaign, stuff you can’t see if all you’re doing is watching TV news, is what fascinates me, and no pollster or pundit will be able to predict the kind of grassroots surge that Santorum’s strategy is intended to achieve.

Notice today that CNN is trying to gin up a phony controversy about Santorum’s endorsement by Vander Plaats. Try to ignore such distracting noise — inside baseball for the political press — and instead let yourself think about what’s happening out there on the ground in Iowa. That mystery is what’s driving me nuts, and it’s only four more days until I fly into Cedar Rapids to find out for myself.

19 comments

  3. I wrote him off because Palin was “The One”. Now that she quit I see him as the best conservative.

    Aside…Robert how about putting the “comments” tag at the end of the articles?

  7. Well, you’ll need something that won’t clash with a brown fedora – how about banana yellow?  That way any stains can be explained as lifelike bruising.

  11. I’m not seeing anything new here.  It will take a bit before the latest endorsements filter into the public knowledge enough to affect polling.  With Christmas only a couple of days away, the dirty little secret the pollsters won’t share is their respondent percentage,  which will be low until at least next week.

    The early Caucus date and the holidays mean there may not be any opportunity for accurate polling between now and the vote.  That doesn’t help a “surging” candidate right now, who would like that news to create a bandwagon effect, but anyone who exceeds expectations on January 3rd may benefit from the shock, since polling won’t have predicted it.

    Of course, also lost in the fall of Gingrich, the rise of Santorum, and the discovery of old Ron Paul video footage claiming he did indeed write his own newsletters is the fact that if Romney wins Iowa, it’s probably as good as over – at least as concerns the current challengers.

  12. Huckabee won Iowa, too.  Ron Paul is polling well in Iowa.  Sadly for the Iowegians (but perhaps happily for the rest of us), they may have relegated themselves to irrelevancy after this year.   Sorry – even if Santorum DOES pull off an upset there, it’s going to be a short-lived one.

  13. Leave it Stacy to spin bad news for his candidate to good news. What he’s not saying, or maybe doesn’t realize, is that Van der Plaats needs that money to buy the gas he’ll need to drive his flock to their shearing the polls. Unfortunately, the bad thing about running a campaign on a shoestring budget is you can’t really afford to pay your supporters gas bills, let alone extra amenities like a dinner at McDonalds, or possibly to rent the vans needed for mass transport. And the pastors can’t justify using church donations or even church vehicles for something like that. That’s all right Stacy, I’m sure all those Churchgoers For Santorum won’t mind sticking their thumbs out. And they’re surely not to proud to brown bag it.

  15. I am always slightly amused to hear Santorum’s claim to have visited all 99 counties in Iowa, as it brings to mind BO’s claim to have visited “all 57” states.

    In my opinion, Santorum has an outside shot at Iowa, but no chance to win the nomination. My opinion may bode well for him, as I am often wrong.

  18. Realistically, I don’t  think he stands a chance — but why should I support “most electable” and/or the ones everyone wants to crown king nominee (and at a disasterously early date if you ask me — great way to give the Dems a gift imho)?  At least in the primaries one should completely vote one’s conscience…and the “most electable” and the “anointed king nominee” make my stomach churn.

    At the very least I won’t break the bank with early purchases of  indigestion pills.
    Go Rick!

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