Can Rick Santorum Be The "Romney Alternative"?

Rick Santorum won Tuesday’s’s primary races in Colorado, Minnesota, and Missourri, situating himself as the “Romney alternative” that Newt Gingrich had worked so hard to cultivate in South Carolina, Florida, and Nevada. Santorum’s win was forecast in Minnesota’s nonbinding primary, but surprised everyone by sweeping all three. This is partly due to his near-disappearance after a slim victory in Iowa, even bypassing any campaign stops for the Florida primary. It’s for this reason that Santorum’s recent wins do not guarantee his place with Romney as front-runners for the nomination.

Santorum has not been able to sustain political momentum much longer than a week, like his surge in Iowa, which doesn’t bode well for running a national campaign. Santorum’s main problems are organizational and financial. His organization of staffers and volunteers was stretched incredibly thin in yesterday’s primary, and although he took all three states, some with a sizable majority, it doesn’t bode well for March 6^th (Super Tuesday) when ten states will be holding primaries with a total 437 delegates up for grabs. In addition, if Santorum were to try to dethrone Romney as nominee-in-waiting, he would need to build a national-sized organization in a few short months. Santorum also has a money problem, with his campaign’s budget being the lowest in cash-value of all four contenders. Nick Ryan, director of Santorum’s Super PAC “Red, White, and Blue”, told POLITICO that he anticipates Santorum will, “capitalize on [his victories] from a fundraising perspective.” However, as Ryan pointed out, Santorum will be attempting to sustain his momentum through the next two primaries in Michigan and Arizona; two states that typically take a lot of money to stay competitive.

One thing that Santorum has been able to do well in his campaign is organizing speeches around information, using data to support policy stances, and preferring wonky info-dumps to the kinds of flowery rhetorical rallying cries that his opponents have favored. At the risk of boring his audiences, this distinction between him and Romney or Gingrich is that his sometimes policy-heavy speeches are starting to turn Republican elites’ heads as well. Gingrich, who has spent more time attacking his opponents than in coming up with real policy ideas, and Romney, arguing that his credentials are actually credible, have both ignored the fact that Santorum has stayed on message, and it’s starting to get peoples’ attention.