Santorum hasn’t “begun” to slip, he has slipped, and he has no chance to recover. If people stick with Santorum hoping he can recover on his own intrinsic merits, he won’t. He hasn’t won any of these states on his own intrinsic merits, only by fortuitous external factors (except for Iowa which he won by personally knocking on every door in Iowa). Santorum only won states because the other candidates didn’t compete, because they killed each other’s reputations with negative ads, or because contraception briefly became the #1 national issue, something Santorum had uniquely spent his career carving out territory on. Santorum’s moment in the sun is gone, dead, done and over.
His supporters have two choices...let his decline go very slowly, splitting the vote between Newt and Rick and giving Mitt wins in states he might not have a ghost of a chance in in a 2-man race, or very quickly drop Rick like a hot potato and jump to Newt. When voters build up Newt like they did in SC, he can soar like no other candidate (raising turnout 35% when all these other states were flat or dropped in turnout), because Newt is INTRINSICALLY the best candidate because of what’s inside his head and his heart. Newt can be hurt by external factors like anyone, but he never needs external factors in order to boost him up the way Santorum did, because Newt has the Right Stuff. You back Newt, and you back a winner. You back Rick, and you back a loser. You back Mitt, and you back a RINO.
Despite Rick’s best efforts for almost an entire month while Newt took time off to raise money, Rick still hasn’t accumulated as many popular votes as Newt has.
Popular vote counts:
Gingrich - 977,272
Santorum - 929,807
However - there’s still 5 percent outstanding in Michigan and 20 percent outstanding in Arizona.
Taking those into account, that is 25k more Santorum votes in Arizona and 15k more Santorum votes in Michigan. Gingrich gets another 12k in Arizona and 3K in Michigan
So that brings us to:
Gingrich 992,272
Santorum 969,807.
So Gingrich has a 20k lead on Santorum in the popular vote heading into Washington.
Will you switch your support to Santorum when Santorum passes Newt in Washington?
Unfortunately, popular votes don’t win the candidacy. It’s all about the electoral votes in the general election. I believe it was MA that passed a law that all their electoral votes would go to the candidate who won the popular vote. These people are still MAD that Al Gore didn’t win in 2000. Lord, they sure do hold grudges, don’t they? Thank God IGore wasn’t president on 9/11.
If your analysis is correct, Romney is the nominee. By the time enough of the voters decide to switch to move Newt out of third or fourth place in the upcoming states, Romney will have locked up enough to coast to a win at the convention. In most Super Tuesday states, Newt would have to double his current polling (in one week) to get into second.