The Santorum campaign is beside themselves after the Michigan GOP decided to award two at-large delegates to Mitt Romney instead of splitting the two proportionally and awarding one to each candidate.
“There’s just no way this is happening,” Santorum spokesman Hogan Gidley said in an e-mail. “We’ve all heard rumors that Mitt Romney was furious that he spent a fortune in his home state, had all the political establishment connections and could only tie Rick Santorum. But we never thought the Romney campaign would try to rig the outcome of an election by changing the rules after the vote. This kind of backroom dealing political thuggery just cannot and should not happen in America.”
The state party appeared to change the rules on Thursday to favor Romney, but RNC committeeman Saul Anuzis, a prominent Romney supporter, said the delegates would always be awarded to the overall winner and blamed the confusion on a circulated memo that mistakenly suggested they would be awarded proportionally.
Romney spokeswoman Andrea Saul responded to TPM in an e-mail that they won fair and square and attacked Santorum for using robo-calls to court Democrats in the primary.
“Rick Santorum encouraged Democrats in Michigan to hijack the Republican Primary,” she wrote. “Because his strategy failed and Mitt Romney won, he is now attacking the Republican Party. The Romney campaign respects the process as determined by the Michigan state party, and we are pleased that we have been awarded a majority of the delegates. We are now focused on the upcoming contests.”
