GRAND RAPIDS, MI — Sure, Rick Santorum gave Mitt Romney a run for his money in his home state. And he should be proud of that. But by not pulling it off, signs point to Santorum making things much harder on himself moving forward than the results indicate.
His primaries party took place in a downtown hotel ballroom at the opulent Amway Grand, where Team Santorum hosted a low-key party to a not-huge crowd. Indicative of his pared-down campaign there were few staff and some strange failed sound cues. The crowd milled around, mostly keeping silent until Santorum entered the room when they gave him some full-throated cheers.
Santorum’s spin is simple: he got close in a state he never should have, the state where Romney was born and raised. That’s a win.
It’s a feeling his team here tonight were keen to push. But there were also concerns about clouds on the horizon thanks to the way Santorum went about getting as close as he did.
On the national level, Santorum lost the establishment when he pulled out his social issue trump card to take on Romney by courting the evangelical vote.
That process reached its peak when he told a tea party crowd outside Detroit that President Obama wants to send more kids to college so he could turn them into liberals. The comment went viral, and likely did not do Santorum many favors outside the ultra-conservative base.
The social issues fight has left Santorum severely wounded when it comes to courting independents and moderate Republicans. None of the views he espoused in the run-up to Michigan were new, but they were resurfaced all at once, taking his campaign’s blue collar economic message off track. Now, no matter what Santorum says, he’s the social issue guy.
Then there were Santorum’s on-the-ground tactics. He didn’t have much time to assemble a campaign here, and was notoriously understaffed throughout. Still, his message resonated and polls showed things were very close heading into Tuesday’s vote. Then Santorum decided to pull out all the stops, firing up a robocall effort that appeared to piggyback off the existing progressive effort to get Democrats to crossover and vote for Santorum as a means to hurt Romney.
Though it may have seemed like smart politics, the optics proved hard to swallow even for his supporters.
“Personally I was disappointed in the substance of them,” Randy Hekman, a candidate for Senate in the crowd at Santorum’s speech Tuesday told me. He said the calls “could be a mistake” but said that overall he was with Santorum when it came to reaching out to Democrats. He just didn’t like the way Santorum did it.
This was a common refrain among Santorum supporters as news of the robocalls spread.
The end result? The calls clearly didn’t get the job done — Santorum came in second after all — and now he’s given Romney something totally new to attack him with. The Romney campaign is relishing the opportunity. A spokesperson told Buzzfeed Tuesday that Romney may include a reference to the calls in his stump speech moving forward, as part of a larger effort to bludgeon Santorum with what Team Romney calls a dirty trick.
So in the end, Santorum’s high water mark — nearly beating the expected nominee on his home turf — may cost a very high price. He’s open to attacks on a pair of new and potentially dangerous fronts: his controversial social stances and his commitment to winning the Republican vote.
