With Rick Santorum riding a nice tailwind after winning several states and cutting it close in Ohio, his campaign is moving on to a new task: gently pushing Newt Gingrich out of the race.
At Santorum’s party in Ohio on Tuesday, aides and supporters denied they were asking Gingrich to step aside. But they did so while simultaneously stressing the importance of winnowing things down to a two-man race with Romney, sighing to reporters how great their position would be if only a certain former speaker would drop his quest for the White House.
“Look at the numbers … we’d be winning these states by 10 points,” Santorum spokesman Hogan Gidley said. “You’re talking about the anti-Romney vote being split three ways.”
Still, he insisted that “we’d never ask anybody to get out of the race.”
Ohio Attorney General Mike DeWine, who switched his allegiance from Romney to Santorum last month and now serves as a top surrogate for the former Pennsylvania senator, echoed Gidley’s line, saying it wasn’t his place to ask Gingrich to leave. But that doesn’t mean he can’t hope, dream and maybe even nudge a little.
“I can’t tell him to get out,” he said, but “most of Newt’s vote would go to Santorum.”
Regardless of Gingrich’s decision, he said he thought the race was passing the former speaker by.
“It’s pretty clear it’s a two-man race — and the calendar starts to favor Rick,” he said.
But that’s not entirely true, as the primary race is about to taken a decidedly Southern turn. Upcoming March contests include primaries in Alabama, Mississippi and Louisiana. Kansas is also fertile ground for conservative anti-Romney votes that both candidates are fighting to secure. It’s not outside the realm of possibility that Gingrich could ride his home-state Georgia win, which he hinted before was crucial to continuing his campaign, to a return to relevance in the contest.
He doesn’t sound like he’s leaving anytime soon.
“If I thought [Santorum] was a slam dunk to beat Romney and beat Obama I would really consider getting out,” he said in an radio interview Wednesday. “I don’t.”
A divided field might be Romney’s best asset going forward. In strong Santorum states like Tennessee and Oklahoma, Gingrich took over 24 percent of the vote, and he took another 14 percent in Ohio, where Santorum lost by only 1 percentage point to Romney.
Benjy Sarlin
Benjy Sarlin is a reporter for Talking Points Memo and co-writes the campaign blog, TPM2012. He previously reported for The Daily Beast/Newsweek as their Washington Correspondent and covered local politics for the New York Sun.
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