Here’s the story the Rick Santorum campaign needs to sell in the next few weeks: Hold your breath through April. May is where it’s at.
That message broke down a bit on a Santorum conference call Tuesday when an adviser asked the press to consider Christine O’Donnell — the conservative Delaware Senate candidate who shocked political watchers by winning the Republican nomination — when weighing Santorum’s chances in the Northeast.
The call was aimed at persuading a skeptical media that existing delegate counts are wrong and Santorum is running a lot closer to Romney than appearances suggest. Santorum’s national delegate director, John Yob, rolled out a proprietary delegate count he says factors in the actual living, breathing delegates being selected in states like Iowa and Missouri, which already held straw polls that have no real impact on the delegates who get sent to the Republican National Convention in late summer.
By Yob’s count, Romney has 435 delegates. Santorum has 311, Newt Gingrich has 158 and Ron Paul has 91. The AP delegate count shows Romney with 523 and Santorum with 253.
Santorum’s campaign said it will provide the proof to back its count sometime soon. But neither count shows a candidate all that close to 1,144 delegates needed to secure the nomination, and that’s why the primary race continues to drag on.
The Santorum camp’s preferred storyline goes like this: Romney wins big on April 24 when New York, Rhode Island, Delaware and Connecticut Republican primary voters go to the polls. Santorum gets a piece of the day with a win in his home state of Pennsylvania, which also votes on April 24 — but his real chance to fight back comes the following month. That’s when the primary calendar turns back to the South, culminating in the May 29 Texas primary.
When that’s all done — the theory goes — Santorum will have picked up a bunch of delegates to counter Romney’s April 24 haul, and we could be headed for a brokered convention. The Santorum camp doesn’t even bother suggesting he can perform with the more moderate Republican electorate in places like New York and Connecticut. There’s no reason for him to raise expectations in places like that.
And yet.
“The Romney argument is that these April states are Northeastern states and therefore more moderate states and therefore more favorable toward a moderate candidate,” Santorum strategist John Brabender said. “However I would point to the primary elections in 2010 in almost all of those states. If you look at the primary elections in those states, famously so, conservatives beat more moderate candidates.”
Santorum, Brabender said, could be just like O’Donnell.
“Ask Mike Castle whether a conservative or a moderate won in Delaware recently,” he said. “Or, very famously, in other states as well.”
The campaign isn’t abandoning its May strategy — it’s just making a relatively bizarre suggestion that Santorum could upend Romney in big places where no one expects him to.
“We do see some opportunity there,” Brabender said of the Northeast. “But we do acknowledge that May is a great month for Rick Santorum and that’ll largely be when we get to our 1,144 number.”
