Former Pennsylvania Sen. Rick Santorum ended his bid for the Republican presidential nomination yesterday, announcing the suspension of his campaign with a primary contest in his home state looming on April 24.
Santorum’s withdrawal, which he attributed to the illness of his young daughter, clears the path to the nomination for frontrunner Mitt Romney, who already had a substantial advantage in the Republican delegate count. With Rep. Ron Paul (R–Texas) and former Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich as his only remaining opponents, University experts said in interviews yesterday that Romney can now focus on November’s general election.
In a brief speech in Gettysburg, Pa., Santorum said his campaign had been a victory, striking the same self-assured tone he held after his wins and losses in the Republican primary contests.
“Against all odds, we won 11 states, millions of voters, millions of votes,” he said in his speech.
Romney released a statement yesterday congratulating Santorum on the success of his campaign and hailing him as “an important voice” in the GOP. At a campaign event in Wilmington, Del., the former Massachusetts governor said he was optimistic about his chances for the Republican nomination and looked forward to the general election.
“This has been a good day for me,” Romney said at the event.
Santorum was the longest lasting Republican candidate challenging Romney, after winning the Republican primaries in Colorado, Minnesota and Missouri before closely losing Romney’s home state of Michigan.
The fact that neither of Romney’s two remaining challengers, Gingrich and Paul, were particularly successful in the Republican primaries nearly assures Romney of the nomination, said communications Prof. Michael Traugott.
“It’s all over,” Traugott said of the race for the Republican nomination. “It was heading towards being all over anyway, but now there’s no effective opposition to Romney. He is the presumptive nominee.”
Gingrich, who won the South Carolina primary in January, vowed yesterday to remain in the race despite victories only there and his home state of Georgia. Traugott said Gingrich stood little chance of topping Romney, but that the former House Speaker’s presence in the election could compel Romney to keep pandering to the Republican Party’s far right wing.
If that is the outcome of Gingrich’s campaign, Traugott predicted trouble for Romney in the general election.
“(Romney’s) doubly cursed,” Traugott said. “He may not be conservative enough to people on the far right, yet he’s become so much more conservative that it could be a concern for moderates in the Republican Party.”
However, LSA junior Brian Koziara, senior adviser to the University’s chapter of the College Republicans, said Romney would be well-equipped to shift his focus to Obama because he’s already been in “general election mode.”
“One of Mitt Romney’s strengths is that he’s been focusing on the general election the whole time through,” Koziara said. “That’s one of the reasons that people see him as electable. He’s been able to focus a clear, concise and accurate message about President Obama.”
Koziara also said he disagreed with the notion that Republican voters may be turned off by Romney’s perceived espousal of more conservative policies during the primary season. He said he thought Republicans recognize that their task in this fall’s general election will be to defeat Obama, not to argue over the merits of their own candidate.
“At the end of the day, Romney has a very fiscally conservative, pro-jobs, pro-economic message,” he said. “That resonates with Republican voters. At the end of the day, jobs and the economy are not Republican issues, they’re not conservative issues — they’re issues where it’s all about who is best to make these things happen.”
For the University’s chapter of College Republicans, Koziara was unsure whether the organization will start pushing for support on campus now that Romney is the definitive candidate.
Still, he said many members of the College Republicans already supported Romney, and even those who didn’t expected Romney to ultimately be the candidate in the general election.
“People have come to terms already with the fact that he’s the likely nominee,” Koziara said. “I think it’s important that we understand that we need to get behind one single individual, and that’s Mitt Romney.”