After a big win in Louisiana, Rick Santorum said his campaign has the momentum moving into early April’s pivotal contest in Wisconsin.
Santorum told CBS’s Face the Nation that his decisive victory shows that he is still very much in the race and that voters are not convinced of Mitt Romney's candidacy.
“They still want to see someone who they can trust, someone who is not running an Etch A Sketch campaign,” he said, “but one that has their principles written on their heart, not on an erasable tablet.”
Santorum said that he does not agree with current delegate counts that are floating around, especially what he called the “bad math” the Romney campaign is releasing. The former Pennsylvania senator sees potential gains in states like Iowa, Florida and Arizona, where he said he'll receive more delegates than were reported.
But after the Santorum campaign touted its win in Louisiana, the Romney campaign again attacked their opponent as a lightweight in the field.
“Rick Santorum is like a football team celebrating a field goal when they are losing by seven touchdowns with less than a minute left in the game,” Romney spokesman Ryan Williams said in an email after their loss.
But Santorum shot back with a laugh, and said it sounded like a “desperate candidate without a message.”
Santorum also defended previous comments about voting for Obama over Romney, and said he was misunderstood. “I have said that from the very beginning,” he said. “I'm going to support whoever the Republican nominee is. I'm running this campaign because I think Barack Obama's re-election would be the end of freedom as we know it here in America.”
Santorum is currently down in the polls and being outspent in Wisconsin. But he spent Saturday campaigning across the Badger State, and even had the opportunity to bowl, where he hit three strikes in a row. The candidate seemed more excited touting his “turkey” than his win in Louisiana.
At a subsequent stop on Sunday in Appleton, Wis., Santorum said the recent turmoil over the recall of the state's Republican governor, Scott Walker, should not impact his campaign.
"It's not the same time so, I think, now that in a sense the campaign has come to Wisconsin I think people are going to get excited," he told reporters. "We saw great turnout in Louisiana yesterday which we're really excited about. And I think we'll see a good turnout here ... We're feeling good that we're going to do well out here in small towns and rural areas and we'll try to crank out the vote and do a big upset here."
Lindsey Boerma contributed
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