Sorry, Rick. Looks like the share of Ron Paul's vote is going to Gingrich this time.
"Rick Santorum looks for comeback in South" by Sarah Schweitzer | Globe Staff, January 11, 2012MANCHESTER, N.H. - As a never-elected 32-year-old lawyer, Rick Santorum won a US House seat against a seven-term incumbent in a heavily Democratic district in western Pennsylvania. He went on to unseat a Democratic senator in 1994, a seat Santorum lost in 2006 in a landslide when he came under criticism for support of the Iraq war and time spent out of his district.
Santorum had been campaigning in New Hampshire since early spring, courting Tea Party movement leaders and social conservatives with an antiabortion, anti-gay-marriage, and pro-gun-rights message. But he lingered at the back of the pack in polls for months. Even just last week, before the Iowa caucuses, Santorum seemed to be an afterthought.
See: Santorum's Iowa Surge
Then he came within a whisker of beating Romney in Iowa and arrived in New Hampshire with momentum. He quickly raised some $3 million, including $1 million takes on two consecutive days, more than he raised in the previous nine months. But it was too late to get television ads on the air in the state, leaving him to rely on grassroots events and media exposure.
Related: Social Issues Sink Santorum in New Hampshire
What do you know, I was right again!
In the closing days of the campaign, Santorum drew media throngs at events and moderate crowds. He argued that voters should ignore conventional wisdom and vote for who they wanted in their hearts - namely, him.
Santorum said repeatedly this week that he wasn’t expecting a first-place win; he said that would go to Mitt Romney. But he had hoped for third place, or even second place. He ended up in fifth, after Gingrich edged past him late in the evening.
Santorum came to the campaign with a national reputation as a stalwart conservative with a combative style. He engaged in a famously pointed exchange on the Senate floor over limits on abortion with Senator Barbara Boxer, Democrat of California, in which he asked whether a fetus would be considered a baby if one foot, or even one toe, was still inside the womb.
Friends and family say his social conservatism, rooted in his devout Catholicism, deepened in 1996, after he and his wife suffered the loss of a child who was born at just 20 weeks. According to a book his wife, Karen, wrote about the death, the couple slept with the baby’s body that night and the next day took him home, where his siblings held him.
That is just a bit too morbid and creepy to me.
His daughter, Elizabeth, a 20-year-old college student who took a year off to travel with her father, said Santorum is not one for particular ritual on election days, other than praying. “We pray as a family,’’ she said.
Yesterday morning, she said, the family had attended Mass at St. John Neumann Church in Merrimack, a polling place there.
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"GOP candidates stumble on facts in debate, November 24, 2011
Former Pennsylvania Senator Rick Santorum and former Massachusetts Governor Mitt Romney got into a back-and-forth over felon voting rights....
Santorum told Romney: “In the state of Massachusetts, when you were governor, the law was that not only could violent felons vote after they exhausted their sentences, but they could vote while they were on probation and parole....”
Romney responded: “As governor of Massachusetts, I had an 85 percent Democratic legislature. This is something we discussed. My view was people who committed violent crimes should not be able to vote, even upon coming out of office [apparently, referring to prison]… I had a state that -- that said that they did not favor my position.”
Oooops!
Little bit of a Freudian slip there, 'eh, Mitt?
Santorum is right that the Massachusetts law is more liberal than the standard he voted for. Massachusetts is one of 13 states that allows felons to vote as soon as they leave prison, even if they remain on probation or parole, according to data collected by the independent non-profit ProCon.org, and by the Brennan Center for Justice at New York University School of Law. Another two states let felons vote from prison. The remaining 35 states have laws that are stricter, restricting felon’s voting rights if they are on parole or probation.
The last time the issue came up publicly in Massachusetts was under Governor Paul Cellucci. Until 2000, Massachusetts allowed felons to vote from prison. In response to prisoners attempting to form a political action committee in 1997, Cellucci advocated for a constitutional amendment banning felons from voting from prison. The state Legislature passed the ban 155-45, and voters adopted the amendment, 60 percent to 34 percent. The amendment did not restrict voting by felons after release from prison.
So that law was in place before Romney became governor in 2003. There is no indication Romney made any attempt to change it.
Kevin Peterson, executive director of the New Democracy Coalition, which opposed stripping prisoners of voting rights, said he cannot recall the issue ever coming up under Romney. “Romney inherited the law,” Peterson said. “He didn’t create it. He didn’t do anything to reverse it.”
How did this issue work its way into the debate anyway?
Kind of more important things to be focusing on right now.
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"Vote fraud will be used to steal votes from Ron Paul and (this time) hand them to Newt Gingrich." -- Wake the Flock Up
I agree with that.
Update:
"A CNN/Time poll released yesterday showed Gingrich was narrowing what had been a sizable Romney lead, with the former House speaker at 23 percent to Romney’s 33 percent. Former senator Rick Santorum trailed further, with 16 percent; Representative Ron Paul had 13 percent; and Governor Rick Perry of Texas had 6 percent....
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