Santorum may have shot himself in the foot in Michigan:
The story for the last week and a half is “OMG Romney is losing to Santorum in his home state, Michigan! How inexplicable, given that his dad was Governor here.” Well, that was 50 years ago. Anybody who voted for George as governor is over 70 now. The majority of the electorate doesn’t know him except from history books. When you look at Mitt Romney’s statements over the last couple of years, it’s really not that surprising that he’s now in some trouble. “Let Detroit go bankrupt” was not a popular stance to take at the time, and now, with GM posting record profits, his attempts at retconning his position that he had a plan for a “managed bankruptcy” that would have worked so much better are sounding more than a bit hollow. This has been in the news for a while; to be perfectly clear, it’s not a secret that his statements are working against him.
So what does Santorum do? He could keep his mouth shut till after next Tuesday and rake in the disgruntled auto workers’ spite-votes against Romney, but nooo. He chimes in to remind people that he, too, opposed the auto bailout. This is a position that is visibly hurting Romney in Michigan, and Santorum jumps in and says “Me too! But even more so!” :smack:
Now, to be fair, he’s said a lot of other unpopular things in the last few days so it’s hard to say this position is exactly what has hurt him, but the fact is that after being up as much as 15% over Romney in Michigan polls in the last week, he’s back to being in a statistical tie.