If you back Rick Santorum, you might want to switch off the TV.
Tuesday’s presidential contest in the Land of Lincoln is following a familiar path this primary: The business-focused Romney is poised to win a state whose electorate is more upscale and secular, full of suburban Republicans drawn to his jobs-heavy message. And as has been the case in a litany of previous battles, Romney and his affiliated Super Pac have outgunned their Santorum counterparts to give the former Massachusetts governor a significant edge in the state.
Those factors add up to a near universal expectation that the GOP front-runner, despite his most recent bruising in Alabama and Mississippi, is set to win another key victory.
“Romney will win the delegate count regardless, unless something really strange happens,” said Kent Redfield, a professor emeritus of politics at the University of Illinois Springfield. “This isn’t going to be a huge victory for Romney, but I think it will be comfortable.”
Ohio and Michigan are the closest facsimiles to Illinois, two Midwest primaries that featured narrow Romney victories. Each state has the same rough demographic sketch, consisting of a sizable population of college-educated, secular Republicans. White-collar Republicans constituted 51 percent of the vote in Michigan, for example – four years ago, the Illinois primary featured 52 percent of college-educated voters.
In Ohio, 47 percent of voters were evangelical, according to exit polls taken after this year’s primary. That’s a similar share to the 41 percent in Illinois in 2008. Both states are far less religious than other GOP primary states – three-quarters of the GOP vote Alabama, for instance, was evangelical.
Despite the demographic edge, Romney won Michigan and Ohio by three and one point, respectively, minute victories that would seem to portend another close contest in Illinois. But the circumstances this go-round are different: the onetime Bay State governor entered the previous two battles trailing his rival, sometimes by double-digits. In Illinois, he enters the race with the lead already in hand.
A Chicago Tribune/WGN-TV poll released Sunday reported Romney in the lead at 35 percent, a small edge over Santorum’s 31 percent. Ex-House Speaker Newt Gingrich, at 12 percent, and Rep. Ron Paul, 7 percent, each trailed badly. And that was before Romney’s TV airwave campaign began to pound away at Santorum.
http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/local/ct-met-illinois-poll-20120311,0,1617767.story
Santorum himself on Friday acknowledged he’s an underdog.
“I don’t think there was a single poll that had us up in Mississippi, so I don’t really worry too much about polls,” he told reporters after a speech in Osage Beach, Mo. “Look, Illinois’s a tough state, I understand. When you’re getting outspent 10 to 1, it’s hard. But we’re gonna keep working, and do the best we can. And we’re fighting money, we’re fighting the organization, and we’re fighting a divided conservative vote. That’s a pretty hard hill, but we’ve been climbing it and doing well.”
As the former senator referenced, he’s being outspent heavily in Illinois, by some estimates as much as five-to-one. That includes a new hard-hitting released Friday that attacks Santorum as an “economic lightweight” and questions his ability to beat President Obama in the fall.
Leave A Comment