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Read more about cookies here. By continuing to use our site, you agree to our Terms of Service and Privacy Policy. Sign up. Read the Shopping Essentials newsletter for unbiased, unsponsored product recommendations every week. Pennsylvania has backed the Democratic candidate for president in every race since , while voters tend to be more conservative in statewide races. In , Rick Santorum, then a year-old attorney, set his sights on a U.
Republican leaders and friends tried to persuade Santorum to run instead for a relatively safe Pennsylvania house seat in Harrisburg. He told friends that Walgren was too liberal for the district and that a conservative could win. Santorum went all in. He quit his job and convinced his soon-to-be wife to quit hers and hit the campaign trail. Ron Klink, a Pittsburgh television reporter who would later go into politics as a Democrat and would lose the Senate race to Santorum, remembers Santorum standing on a bridge leading into downtown Pittsburgh, waving his campaign sign at passing cars.
Schmidt says Santorum was involved in all aspects of campaigning. He wore out three pairs of shoes criss-crossing the congressional district, says Schmidt.
Santorum would often follow up with a hand-written note to voters he had met that day, Schmidt says. Santorum had a simple message: The incumbent, Walgren, was out of touch with his district because he lived in the Washington area rather than in Pennsylvania.
Pro-life was really gathering steam Santorum ended up winning the district with just over 51 percent of the vote. Two years later, with the district looking likely to turn Democratic in , Schmidt says, Santorum turned his sights on a Senate seat.
But the strength of the feelings that Santorum evokes pretty much explains why the former Pennsylvania senator, even at this late stage, could put a serious fright into Mitt Romney, and, just conceivably, could take him down.
To educated liberals of almost any description, Santorum is an abomination. With his seven kids, his Jaycee fashion code, his nineteen-seventies colonial MacMansion in northern Virginia, his irony bypass, he seems to delight in outraging self-styled urban sophisticates: the sort of folks who buy organic milk, watch The Daily Show , and read the New York Times and The New Yorker , of course.
As he has displayed in Colorado, Iowa, Minnesota, and Missouri, he is attractive to Republican inhabitants of small towns and rural areas, many of them alienated Evangelical Christians who take it as an article of faith that President Obama is merely the public face of a secular conspiracy intent on altering their country beyond recognition. With his hardscrabble roots and message of economic populism, he can also appeal to less devout but economically squeezed middle-income Republicans and Reagan Democrats, of whom there are many.
Ever since the political realignment of the nineteen-sixties and seventies, when the civil-rights movement prompted many southern whites and northern ethnics to switch parties, Democratic strategists have learned to fear Republican candidates, such as Ronald Reagan, who combined conservative social views with populist economics. Santorum is no Reagan. He sometimes comes across as bitter and twisted rather than sunny and optimistic.
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