FYI, people did not sit up and take notice of Santorum in IA. They listened to their preachers. As happened in ‘08, there was a last minute push by IA’s Evangelical leaders. Apparently Evangelical voters do what their preachers tell them. There are not enough Evangelicals to get Santorum elected, as there were not enough Evangelicals to elect Huckabee.
There aren’t enough evangelicals in South Carolina, but there are enough evangelicals to push Santorum over the top in Iowa?
It just seems the simpler explanation to me that Santorum got people’s attention in Iowa, and his showing in Iowa got a lot of people’s attention that he hadn’t gotten in the year previous.
But what do I know? He was at 2 percent in South Carolina 3 weeks ago, and now he’s at 16. I sincerely doubt he would have got this far already without his showing in Iowa turning heads.
Yes, it was ‘people’ who noticed Santorum in Iowa. He met with small groups in each of Iowa’s 99 counties, quietly gaining support that was seen as a surprise to reporters in Des Moines. Iowa last-minute evangelical leaders’ push was as much for Gingrich as for Santorum. Evangelical leaders were in something of a quandary, as Catholics aren’t usually very popular.
Iowa has no more evangelicals than the national average, and no, that’s not enough to put a candidate over the top. Iowans are about twice as likely as the national average to belong to mainstream liberal Protestant denominations.