Poll: Santorum Ahead Of Romney In Buckeye State

Ohio News Network reports:

TOLEDO, Ohio - A new poll shows Rick Santorum edging ahead of Mitt Romney in Ohio.

The Quinnipiac University poll out Wednesday found that Santorum jumped to the lead with Ohio voters just three weeks before the Republican presidential primary.

The former Pennsylvania senator leads Romney 36-29 percent among likely primary voters.

Former U.S. House Speaker Newt Gingrich was third with 20 percent.

A Quinnipiac poll released last month had the former Massachusetts governor Romney well ahead of Santorum, but that was before Santorum's sweep in Colorado, Minnesota and Missouri last week...

Great news! By the way, although the events have not yet been posted on his website, Santorum will be visiting here in Ohio this Friday and Saturday. I'm going to try to get to one of his events if there's one nearby.

As for why Santorum performs so well against Romney in potential Midwestern swing states like Missouri, Michigan, and Ohio, my friend, Don McClarey links to this piece in The New York Times by Ross Douthat that provides a fairly good explanation:

It’s been clear since Iowa that Rick Santorum, of all the Republican contenders, posed the most serious challenge to Mitt Romney. Now we’re seeing why.

[...]

If Santorum were simply the latest “true conservative” alternative to Romney – another Michele Bachmann or Herman Cain, a brazen ideologue without a hint of moderation – then the script would be clear enough. Romney would emphasize his experience, his competence and his electability and gradually box out Santorum the way that, for example, Michael Dukakis boxed out Jesse Jackson in 1988.

But Santorum’s advantage is that he can get to Romney’s right and to his left at once. On the one hand, Santorum isn’t responsible for a health care bill that looks an awful lot like “Obamacare” and he doesn’t have a long list of social-issue flip-flops in his past. This makes his candidacy a plausible rallying point for the voters who previously turned Bachmann and Cain and the pre-debate Rick Perry into conservative flavors of the month.

At the same time, though, Santorum’s persona, his record and his platform all have a populist tinge that plays well in states like Michigan, Ohio and Pennsylvania, where swing voters tend to be socially conservative but economically middle-of-the-road. (Hence the Michigan poll that showed him leading among independents and Democrats who plan to vote in that state’s open primary.)

This means that Santorum can play the same anti-Bain, anti-rich-guy, blue-collar card that Gingrich tried to play in New Hampshire and South Carolina – but subtly, implicitly, in ways that don’t make him sound like he belongs in Occupy Wall Street instead of the Republican primary.

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