Santorum shakes it up

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Alexander Larman

The sad decline of Oxford

Consult the soothsayers again, and rewrite the forecasts: the race for the Republican nomination has taken yet another turn. No-one much talked about Rick Santorum after he was retroactively awarded victory in January’s Iowa caucus, as most pundits’ attention had already moved on to Romney and Gingrich. But last night this disregarded politician triumphed in all three votes: the caucuses in Colorado and Minnesota, and a primary in Missouri. The Colorado victory was a particular shock, given how easily Romney won there in 2008.

Team Romney might be tempted to dismiss last night’s results, not least because the Missouri primary is ‘non-binding’ (the awarding of delegates will be determined at conventions later this year) and because of the overwhelming financial firepower their man can bring to bear on the next round of votes, including ‘Super Tuesday’ on 6 March. But I reckon this is more significant than that. What it does is further exacerbate one of Romney’s main problems: the sense that he is not the winning sort. This is the man who lost to McCain who lost to Obama, and now he cannot rally anything like enthusiastic support from the conservative base. He may still be the favourite for the nomination (odds of 1/6 with Ladbrokes, against Santorum’s 6/1), but there is increasingly something insipid, something limp about his position.

Romney’s solace now is not just his heavy campaign machinery, but also the chance that Santorum and Newt Gingrich will split the ‘Anyone but Mitt’ vote between them. Just as the Republican vote hasn’t swung behind the frontrunner, neither has it swung behind any one of the alternatives. There is now talk that Gingrich erred in not focusing on last night’s contests (he’s out and about in Ohio), now that they have catapulted Santorum back into the headlines. But the main conclusion to be made is simply this: nothing is a foregone conclusion.