Regarding Rick Santorum (user search)
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  Regarding Rick Santorum (search mode)
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Author Topic: Regarding Rick Santorum  (Read 6475 times)
pbrower2a
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« on: March 24, 2013, 08:55:39 AM »

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I'm not saying he spent the entire debate bringing social issues into the mix, but that he was willing to go where no other candidate really was, I think that's important.  If the other candidates all go ECONOMY ECONOMY ECONOMY I think there's an opening for Santorum to be able to appeal to a significant amount of republican voters by connecting fiscal and social problems. Speaking their language, as it were.


In all likelihood, the economy will be better in 2016 than it was in 2012. People will still be grumbling about the national debt, but people have always grumbled about it. If the ACA is still around by the primaries, it's never going away. Any discussion of it from then on will be about tinkering with it; instead of "Kill Obamacare!" the battle will focus on things like preventing abortions from being covered and making sure employers aren't required to offer coverage to same-sex partners or something.

There is definitely an opening for Rick Santorum to run as a social conservative - but not as a '90s era SoCon who goes on and on about school prayer and the immorality of Hollywood. If he runs as a social conservative who sees a more traditional family structure as aiding the economic situation of the working class, he could very well have an audience. If he doesn't harp on gay marriage, he could run as the sort of Republican that David Frum and Ross Douthat have been pining for since 2006-ish. If he's willing to bend his party's Randian, laissez-faire economic views, he may even find some sympathetic ears among those in the Democratic Party who are not part of Obama's "gentry coalition" of minorities and upscale whites.

Same-sex marriage will be largely a non-issue in D-leaning states and every imaginable swing state as of 2012. Santorum is enough of a political chameleon to attract enough people of the sorts who did not vote against him in Pennsylvania in 2006. Democrats are going to be silent about him until he wins the nomination, and then they will tie him to Dubya and abuse of power while in the Senate, after which he would be lucky to lose only as badly as Goldwater.

Barring an economic collapse that Republicans can tie to President Obama, Democrats win the Presidency if they keep the "gentry" vote of government employees and middle-class.  minorities. Laissez-faire economics are increasingly being connected to rapacious elites who act as tyrants in their own domains.

The Republican coalition remains the sorts of people who demand that everyone else suffer for their greed so that as obedient servants in abject poverty they can get pie-in-the-sky-when-you-die, their brutal enforcers, and the people who accept the offer.   
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pbrower2a
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« Reply #1 on: March 29, 2013, 09:59:26 AM »
« Edited: March 29, 2013, 03:59:46 PM by pbrower2a »

Rick Santorum vs. competent white Democrat, 2016.  No guesses on MS, SC, or SD.



It could look like LBJ in 1964.
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pbrower2a
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« Reply #2 on: March 29, 2013, 04:15:08 PM »
« Edited: March 30, 2013, 02:22:36 PM by pbrower2a »

Haha. Louisiana flips. Haha. Tennessee flips. Arkansas, too. Kentucky. West Virginia.


As late as 1996 they had gone twice for Bill Clinton. Hillary Clinton has been shown leading such luminaries as Paul Ryan and Marco Rubio in two of those states (KY, LA -- I have nothing else on the others) even though Barack Obama is wildly unpopular in those states.

Barack Obama won nationwide despite losing those states by margins similar to those of George McGovern and Walter Mondale in blowout losses. Need I tell you why? Take out that reason and Barack Obama wins with a percentage of popular votes characteristic of Eisenhower in the 1950s or Reagan in the 1980s.

Rick Santorum was a Senate enforcer for an unpopular President. Pennsylvania voters rejected him 59-41 in 2006. If he should win the Republican nomination he has plenty of stuff -- like his voting record -- to be used against him.  

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Pennsylvania looks like the tipping-point state of 2016. He could win Pennsylvania -- in its Republican primary. In the general election he loses 59-41, which suggests what the national election could be like. Hillary Clinton will still get a lock on the black vote, but Southern white people will not be voting against a black man as a nominee.

Does she get the Clinton-but-not-Obama vote of the 1990s or the Carter-but-not-Obama vote of the 1970s? The latter wins the whole of the former Confederacy except Virginia (the only former-Confederate state that Carter did not win)... and we all know how Virginia is drifting. Santorum has little to offer the South.
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pbrower2a
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« Reply #3 on: March 30, 2013, 02:14:33 PM »

As late as 1996 they had gone twice for Bill Clinton. Hillary Clinton has been shown leading such luminaries as Paul Ryan and Marco Rubio in two of those states

Correct. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton has been leading them. Wait until reality kicks in in about a year or two.

No point in arguing the rest. I've probably been over it literally five hundred times around here.

I concede that both Rubio and Ryan are weak potential nominees for President. Reality is that Marco Rubio barely won a Senate election in Florida in a three-way election in the best year for right-wing Republican pols nationwide for years. Ryan demonstrates why active members of the House of Representatives make poor candidates for President. Ryan could not swing Wisconsin, a fringe swing state, in the Presidential election.

Santorum has whatever electoral advantages come from being a Catholic. For Protestant voters he is the wrong sort of Catholic. Ryan at the least doesn't rub his Catholicism in people's faces.
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pbrower2a
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« Reply #4 on: April 27, 2013, 04:17:03 PM »

As late as 1996 they had gone twice for Bill Clinton. Hillary Clinton has been shown leading such luminaries as Paul Ryan and Marco Rubio in two of those states

Correct. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton has been leading them. Wait until reality kicks in in about a year or two.

No point in arguing the rest. I've probably been over it literally five hundred times around here.

And dead wrong literally 498 times.

Indeed it is usually hard to predict what sort of reality will kick in a year, two, or especially three. Even the actuarial concerns kick in. 
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