Illinois a key test for Santorum's strategy

MITT ROMNEY and Rick Santorum campaigned furiously across Barack Obama’s home state of Illinois yesterday in the run-up to today’s Republican primary. Romney held three events, Santorum four.

Their choice of venues symbolised the economic and cultural rift in the Republican party. Santorum appealed to voters’ emotions and ideology by speaking in Ronald Reagan’s hometown of Dixon in front of a statue of the father of the conservative revolution.

Romney struck a more intellectual chord by delivering an address on economic freedom at the University of Chicago, where President Obama once taught. Romney has called both Obama and Santorum economic lightweights. “I don’t think you are going to replace an economic lightweight with another economic lightweight,” he said at the weekend. “It’s time to put in place an economic heavyweight, and I am, and I’ll get the job done.”

Obama’s campaign adviser David Axelrod mocked Romney, saying, “If he thinks he’s an economic heavyweight, he must be looking in a funhouse mirror, because that is not the record of an economic heavyweight.”

Romney says his success as a venture capitalist proves he can turn the US economy around. Unfortunately for him, the economy is improving. Obama bases his campaign – most notably in a new 17-minute video narrated by Tom Hanks – on the idea that things would have been much worse if he were not in charge. Romney argues that things would have been much better.

“I believe the economy is coming back, by the way,” Romney admitted at a campaign stop in Springfield, Illinois, yesterday. “The economy always comes back after a recession, of course . . . The problem is this one has been deeper than it needed to be and a slower recovery than it should have been, by virtue of the policies of this president. Almost everything he’s done has made it harder for this economy to recover.”

A Chicago Tribune/WGN-TV poll earlier this month showed Romney winning 35 per cent of the vote in Illinois and Santorum 31 per cent, which is within the margin of error. Romney will do well in the wealthy suburbs of Chicago, while Santorum will win more votes in the rural, conservative south.

Santorum is often his own worst enemy. He lost the primary in Puerto Rico by a huge margin on Sunday night, largely because of a remark that Puerto Rico would be required by law to make English its official language if it wanted to become a state. There is no such law. Romney won 83 per cent of the vote to 8 per cent for Santorum, securing all 20 delegates from the US territory.

Santorum also failed to file slates of delegates in several Illinois congressional districts. His disorganised, shoestring campaign made the same mistake in Ohio, and failed to qualify altogether for ballots in Virginia and the District of Columbia.

The Illinois oversight more than obliterates the gains Santorum made by winning Alabama and Mississippi last week.

Romney now has 518 delegates, Santorum 239, Newt Gingrich 139 and Ron Paul 69, according to CNN estimates. Santorum and Gingrich want to prevent Romney from reaching the 1,144 delegates it would take to clinch the nomination, forcing the first brokered convention in decades.

If Romney wins Illinois, it will help him rebound from his third place showing in Alabama and Mississippi. Economically and geographically, Illinois resembles Michigan and Ohio, where Romney defeated Santorum by narrow margins.

But Republicans in Illinois, as in the rest of the country, have shifted rightward since the advent of the Tea Party.

Santorum’s challenge to Romney would receive an immense boost if he could win a big state with a smaller proportion of evangelical Christians. Exit polls in all the states Santorum has won so far showed more than 50 per cent of voters self-identified as born-again Christians.

Sixty-five per cent of Santorum supporters told a Washington Post/ABC News poll they want their presidential candidate to share their religious beliefs. Only 40 per cent of Romney voters said the same thing.

Santorum implies he is God’s choice for Republican nominee. “One of the great blessings I’ve had in every political campaign is people underestimate me, people underestimate what God can do,” he said at the weekend.

Healso portrays himself as the candidate of rural America, versus urban America, which votes for Romney and Obama.

“If you look at where my Republican opponent has won, it’s always in and around the cities,” he said. “And he’s winning the areas the Democrats win, and I win the areas the Republicans win. Does that tell you something, maybe?”