At the end of Rick Santorum’s first night in Puerto Rico, where he had come to campaign in the March 18 Isla del Encanto primary, the Republican challenger took to the pulpit in a San Juan church and engaged at once in the utterly familiar and the wholly unexpected—in the space of two sentences invoking the Almighty and expressing firm accordance with Mitt Romney. “One of my opponents recently said that it would take an act of God for me to win [the GOP nomination],” Santorum informed the cheering crowd. “I agree with him.”
Santorum, of course, wasn’t really buying in to the analysis of the Republican race being peddled by Romney and his team, who had cited the deity not to praise Him but to describe the dauntingness of the delegate math facing their main opponent. And, no doubt, the challenge confronting Santorum in this regard is stiff indeed. Though none of the extant delegate counts compiled by the Republican National Committee, the campaigns, or various media outlets is regarded by anyone as definitive, there is broad agreement that Romney has roughly twice as many as Santorum and that the latter would need to win somewhere between 60 and 65 percent of those still in play to accumulate the 1,144 necessary to secure the nomination before the Republican convention in Tampa in August.
Santorum’s people freely admit that this outcome is far from likely. “I’m not saying it’s impossible,” his chief strategist, John Brabender, told me the other night, “but I’ll admit it’s a pretty lofty goal.” Which would be problematic if Team Santorum were actually pursuing that objective—but, in truth, it is not. What Santorum and his shoestring campaign aim to do instead is prevent Romney from obtaining the magic 1,114 before the primaries end in June; keep winning states and building the narrative that it’s Santorum who has captured the hearts and minds of the Republican base; and then emerge from a contested convention as the party’s standard-bearer. The chances of all this happening are small, to be sure. But if things fell into place just so, it could—and here’s a five-step scenario as to how.
1. Santorum wins Illinois. After Romney’s third-place finishes in Alabama and Mississippi (especially after his minions foolishly stoked expectations that he’d win both), the pressure is fierce on the former Massachusetts governor to carry the primary this Tuesday, March 20, in the Land of Lincoln. But, in fact, a victory there is more essential to Santorum. Both candidates so far have been triumphal in the states and regions where they should have been: Romney in the Northeast and the West, Santorum in the Plains and the South. The industrial Midwest, however, is something like level turf, with Santorum hailing from Pennsylvania and Romney from Michigan. In the Wolverine State and Ohio, Santorum fell just short; turning that around in Illinois would be a significant psychological blow to Romney and would feed the story line that the front-runner is on his heels.
Illinois hasn’t seen a competitive Republican presidential primary in decades, so the forecasts of what might unfold there are confounded by the absence of recent precedent. Recent polls put Santorum behind by single digits, and the conventional wisdom says that Romney should be buoyed by the large chunks of moderate suburban Republican voters in the suburbs of Chicago. But downstate Illinois is much more like the South than most people realize, and Santorum may be helped as well by the fact that Newt Gingrich has effectively abandoned Illinois to focus his efforts on Louisiana. According to Brabender, the plan is for Santorum to focus intensely on the economy between now and Tuesday (“The other stuff, voters already get,” Brabender says, in the understatement of the year). If Santorum can stick to that message—which he’s shown virtually no ability to do so far—he has a chance.
2. Gingrich drops out. A win by Santorum in Illinois would send him into Louisiana four days later with the wind at his back—and thus poised to deliver a knockout blow to Newton Leroy. The problem, of course, is that Santorum’s wins in Alabama and Mississippi should have been sufficient to leave Gingrich flat and twitching on the canvas. But the former Speaker of the House just keeps on ticking, like some mutant hybrid of a meth-addled Energizer Bunny and a rage-fueled teddy bear. Even under increasing pressure from Republicans across the board to cede the field and let Santorum face Romney one-on-one, Gingrich continues to insist he will carry his determined death march all the way to Tampa.
Gingrich’s remaining in the race is widely seen as uniformly bad for Santorum, in that his presence, in theory, splits the far-right vote and hence helps Romney. In fact, were Newt to drop out, it would likely be marginally helpful to Romney in states where delegates are awarded proportionally, since some Gingrich voters would switch to the front-runner and push up his delegate total. Yet Gingrich’s bowing out would help Santorum more in the important winner-take-all (or winner-take-all by congressional district) states ahead on the calendar, such as California, New Jersey, and Wisconsin. For Santorum to deny Romney the magic 1,144 and keep their delegate counts as close as possible, Gingrich needs to quit the race soon—which may require Sheldon Adelson to close his checkbook once and for all.
3. Survive April, thrive in May. After Illinois and Louisiana, the race heads into a stretch that shapes up extremely well for Romney. Of the eight contests on the calendar in April—the District of Columbia, Maryland, and Wisconsin on the third, and Connecticut, Delaware, New York, Pennsylvania, and Rhode Island on the 24th—only the one in Santorum’s home state looks like a sure winner for him. For the challenger, this will be the harshest month for sure, one in which Romney will not only rack up a raft of wins but widen his delegate lead. For Santorum to emerge alive, I think, will require him to carry one significant state that he’s not expected to; his best chance is Wisconsin.
If Santorum can manage that, however, the month of May could be almost as kind to him as April is cruel. In a delegate-strategy memo the Santorum campaign released recently to the press, it maintained, “We believe that May 8 is the beginning of the end for Mitt Romney and the date that puts Rick Santorum on a path to the nomination.” And while this wildly overstates the case, there is something to it. Assuming voters still see him as viable, all of the following states with contests in May are ones that Santorum could plausibly win: Arkansas, Indiana, Kentucky, Nebraska, North Carolina, Texas, and West Virginia. (The sole bright spot for Romney in May: Oregon.)
4. Pull off a June surprise. For Romney, the California and New Jersey primaries on June 5, together with the contest in Utah at the end of the month, have long been seen as a kind of final firewall. For Santorum, they represent a last chance to upset expectations and put a dent in Romney’s narrative of algebraic inevitability and his delegate accumulation. There are other states voting in June where Santorum might fare well: South Dakota, Montana, and New Mexico. But for him to have a reasonable chance at claiming the nomination in Tampa, he will probably need to pull off a shocker—and judging from my conversation with Brabender, California will be the place where his team tries to do it.
5. Harvest grassroots gold in Tampa—and before. Until recently, Santorum’s campaign had no delegate-counting or delegate-wrangling operation whatsoever. It does now, and its ability to execute will be key to Santorum’s prospects if everything else outlined above somehow materializes. In its delegate-strategy memo, Santorum’s squad rightly points out that in many cases the selection of representatives to the national convention takes place not in the primaries and caucuses (which are often just “beauty contests”) but at county, district, and state conventions, “where activists are more conservative than the average primary voter.”
Santorum’s people hope to make headway at those conventions, not only adding to their delegate totals but also filling the Tampa convention hall with delegates inclined to jump ship on Romney after the first ballot (assuming that he arrives there with fewer than the magic 1,144 in his back pocket). “Mitt Romney must have a majority on the first ballot in order to win the nomination,” the memo states, “because he will perform worse on the subsequent ballots as grassroots conservative delegates decide to back the more conservative candidate. Subsequently, Santorum only needs to be relatively close on the initial ballot in order to win on a later ballot as Romney’s support erodes.”
All this may sound like a fantasy—or at least a piece of highly Hollywoodized political fiction—only given credence by a bunch of journalistic hacks whose fondest dream is to experience a contested national convention. (I’m looking at me here.) But then again, everything about Santorum’s rise has had about it more than a faint whiff of the fantastical. “I guarantee you that last July the Romney folks weren’t sitting around planning for a future in which they’d be fighting one-on-one all through this spring against Rick Santorum,” Brabender says. “Nobody thought that.” And if the unthinkable has already happened, why couldn’t it happen again—with or without any intercession from the guy or gal upstairs?
E-mail: jheilemann@gmail.com.