Tag Archives: Rick Santorum

Perry and Bachmann to reassess their campaigns after disappointing loss in Iowa

Here are the Iowa election results from Fox News as of 2 AM on Wednesday morning:

Candidate Votes Percent
Santorum 29,968 25%
Romney 29,964 25%
Paul 26,186 22%
Gingrich 16,241 14%
Perry 12,592 11%
Bachmann 6,070 5%
Huntsman 744 <1%

And now the good news for Rick Santorum: Rick Perry and Michele Bachmann are both reassessing their campaigns.

Fox News:

Michele Bachmann said she’s soldiering on, giving no indication that she would bail on her Republican presidential campaign after a last-place showing in the contested Iowa caucuses, while Rick Perry, who finished just ahead of her in fifth, said he’s going back to Texas to “determine whether there is a path forward.”

“I believe I am the best conservative who can and who will beat Barack Obama in 2012,” Bachmann told supporters late Tuesday night following projections that she would be last in the six-way contest. Jon Huntsman decided not to compete in Iowa.

“In 2012, there could be another president in the White House. Who knows? There could be another Michele in the White House,” Bachmann said, referencing her shared name with first lady Michelle Obama.

Despite her pledges to go on, Bachmann campaign manager Keith Nahigian told The Associated Press that he couldn’t say with certainty whether Bachmann would go forward with her candidacy.

“I don’t know yet,” he said. “It’s hard to tell, but everything is planned.”

Asked about the report, Bachmann Communications Director Alice Stewart told Fox News that the AP story said it’s “uncertain.” “That’s true,” she said.

Bachmann’s 6 percent showing was a sharp turn after finishing in first place during the Ames, Iowa, GOP straw poll over the summer.

Perry, who doubled Bachmann’s raw vote total but earned only 11 percent overall, said he’s reassessing what he will do. He’s making that decision in light of the first-in-the-nation vote, but not before the Texas governor announced his campaign was making an ad buy in South Carolina, the third state to vote.

Perry has described the GOP presidential race as a marathon, but after spending the most of any campaign on Iowa advertising, his poor showing in Iowa won’t lend any momentum as the candidates go to New Hampshire, the first primary state of the election season, where Perry places last in polling.

The latest results are actually worse for Bachmann – 5%, not 6%. I think she should get out now and endorse Rick Santorum.

What’s interesting is that Mitt Romney had to spend a heck of a lot more money than Rick Santorum did in order to get the same 25% of the vote. What does that tell you about Mitt Romney as a candidate?

UPDATE: Bachmann is out, Perry is still in.

CBS News smears Santorum with racism because he is anti-welfare

CBS News is painting Santorum’s opposition to welfare as racism – by inserting words he didn’t say into their “transcript” of his speech.

Excerpt:

The left and media are sending out a false story about what Rick Santorum said at an Iowa event. A CBS News transcript falsely claimed that Santorum said if elected he plans to cut regulations and entitlements and he doesn’t want to “make black people’s lives better by giving them somebody else’s money.”

The video is below. It’s clear he did NOT say that, and he was referring to people on welfare in general, and race was not mentioned. But that doesn’t keep people like this from using it as propaganda. It’s frustrating because so many will read the false story and believe it. But that’s the purpose of the propaganda.

Here is what Santorum said in full:

“It [Medicaid] just keeps expanding. I was Indianola a few months ago, and I was talking with someone who works at the Department of Public Welfare here, and she told me that the state of Iowa is going to get fined if they don’t sign up more people under the Medicaid program. They’re just pushing harder and harder to get more and more of you dependent upon them so that they can get your vote. “I don’t want to make [pause] lives, people’s lives better by giving them somebody else’s money.”

Even liberal Tommy Christopher at Mediaite admits Santorum didn’t say what the CBS transcript says he did.

The left is determined to paint the GOP as bigoted because even if they lose a tiny portion of the black vote, it could be enough for Obama to lose, so they lie.

Journalists are indoctrinated in J-school to view conservatives as guilty of SIXHIRB – sexism, intolerance, xenophobia, homophobia, Islamophia, racism, bigotry. While the rest of learn quantitative, marketable skills, journalists spend 4 years learning how to be biased and how to mislead the public.

Santorum is pro-family, and so he opposes welfare. Welfare is anti-family because it makes fathers optional and encourages women to have children with men who will not commit for life and will not prepare to provide for a family. The mainstream media believes that it is too much of a burden on women to insist on these antiquated sex roles – they would rather tax working fathers to subsidize fatherlessness. And if they have to drum up popular support for subsidized fatherlessness by smearing conservatives, then that’s what they’ll do. Santorum says, and I agree, that people on welfare would be better off if they were working, instead.

In other news, leftist Alan Colmes mocks Rick and Karen Santorum for grieving over their miscarriage.

Excerpt:

National Review Editor Rich Lowry and Liberal commentator Alan Colmes clashed on Fox News Monday when Lowry interjected to rebuke Colmes’ criticism of the way Republican presidential candidate Rick Santorum and his wife handled the death of their infant newborn Gabriel, who lived for only two hours in 1996.

“I even think some of the dastardly characters we have in the main stream media are not going to go as low as you just have Alan,” Lowry said at one point.

The heated rhetoric began early on in the segment when Colmes said undecided voters will ultimately not stick with the surging Santorum once people “get a load of some of the crazy things he’s said and done, like taking his two-hour-old baby when it died right after child birth home and played with it so that his other children would know that the child was real.”

You have to exercise judgment when dealing with the mainstream media. They have their worldview, and they fit the facts to it.

PPP poll of 1340 likely Iowa voters: Paul 20, Romney 19, Santorum 18

From Democrat pollster PPP.

Excerpt:

Ron Paul is at 20%, Mitt Romney at 19%, and Rick Santorum at 18%. Rounding out the field are Newt Gingrich at 14%, Rick Perry at 10%, Michele Bachmann at 8%, Jon Huntsman at 4%, and Buddy Roemer at 2%.

The momentum in the race is completely on Santorum’s side. He’s moved up 8 points since a PPP poll earlier in the week, while no one else has seen more than a one point gain in their support. Among voters who say they decided who to vote for in the last seven days he leads Romney 29-17 with Paul and Gingrich both at 13.

Santorum’s net favorability of 60/30 makes him easily the most popular candidate in the field. No one else’s favorability exceeds 52%.  He may also have more room to grow in the final 48 hours of the campaign than the other front runners: 14% of voters say he’s their second choice to 11% for Romney and only 8% for Paul. Santorum’s taken the lead with two key groups of Republican voters: with Tea Partiers he’s at 23% to 18% for Gingrich, 16% for Paul, 15% for Bachmann, and only 12% for Romney.  And with Evangelicals he’s at 24% to 16% for Gingrich, and 15% for Paul and Romney.

Other than Santorum’s rise the other big story of this week is Paul’s fall.  He was at 24% earlier in the week but has dropped to 20%. That decline in support coincides with a precipitous drop in his favorability numbers. On our last poll he was at +13 (53/40), but that’s gone down 21 points on the margin to -8 (43/51).

Robert Stacy McCain writes that Santorum has a decent ground game in New Hampshire.

If you missed my endorsement of Santorum, click here.