Santorum courts rural votes
Associated Press
WEST MONROE, La.
Republican presidential nominating contests often reveal a rural-urban split in the party, but what sets this year’s campaign apart is the emphasis Rick Santorum is placing on that divide and wearing his successes in small-town America as a badge of honor.
To hear Santorum tell it, the ability of front-runner Mitt Romney to win in big-city suburbs is a mark of ideological weakness, not political strength.
“Gov. Romney does well in the counties where Democrats do well, and we do well in the counties where Republicans do well,” Santorum said this week. “That might give you some indication as to who the candidate is who best reflects the values of the Republican party.”
Whereas President Barack Obama once infamously tried to explain rural culture with an anthropologist’s detachment, saying rural Americans “cling to guns or religion” out of a sense of economic desperation, Santorum happily embraces the culture. He worships with Pentecostals in central Louisiana one day and campaigns at a gun range in the north on another, testing his marksmanship by pulling the trigger of a .45-caliber semiautomatic Colt pistol.
Crisscrossing Louisiana this week and Illinois before that, Santorum thrived in small cities and rural areas where social conservatism runs deep, where the stresses of a slow economic recovery are intensely felt and where his faith-based, small-government message resonates more deeply than in cities and suburbs.
In state after state since he began to emerge as the not-Romney candidate in the Republican field, Santorum has beaten Romney in rural areas, even in states Romney ultimately won. In Michigan and Ohio, states where Romney barely prevailed, Santorum won the rural vote 43 percent to 34 percent, and 46 percent to 28 percent, respectively, according to exit polls.
In Illinois, where Romney easily won, Santorum still took the rural-small city vote 45 percent to 35 percent.
Santorum is expected to win today in Louisiana, where he has campaigned more vigorously than Romney.
And while Santorum continues to collect delegates off his success in rural counties and congressional districts, his relative weakness elsewhere raises doubts about his ability to slow Romney’s march to the nomination.
“He needs to do a lot better in the suburbs than he has recently,” John Feehery, a Republican strategist and former top House Republican leadership aide, said of Santorum. “He’s definitely the candidate of the sticks.”
Stuart Roy, an adviser to a super political action committee that supports Santorum, said Santorum’s inability to break through in the suburbs and cities is in a part a function of his conservative message.
“He is maximizing the social conservative base in most states,” Roy said. “In doing that you are going to lose some of that suburban moderate vote. There is a trade-off there. The idea here is to win the primary or caucus. It’s not about where the vote comes from.”
But he said another factor is limited money. Santorum’s campaign operates on a shoe-string budget and that means buying television advertising in cheaper markets, which tend not be in the big cities. As a result, suburban voters aren’t as exposed to his message as they are to Romney’s, along with Romney’s deep-pocketed campaign and super PAC.
Santorum aides downplay the need for stringing together state victories, noting that he can keep amassing delegates by winning in states that are conservative strongholds like Louisiana and otherwise staying within reach with rural and small-town victories that also yield a share of delegates.