It may be obvious to you, but not to me.
58 posted on Tuesday, January 31, 2012 9:38:25 PM by tsowellfan: “That being said, I also know that Santorum does have legit supporters but not all that claim to support him are really wishing that he be the nominee. Romney supporters don’t just shut up. They just approach it from another angle :)”
I won't join Yaelle in calling you “insane” (post 68) because I don't dispute the reality of deception in politics, but I'm going to say I was anti-Romney **LONG** before I was a supporter of Santorum, and I thank Free Republic for waking me up to the horrible nature of Romney's debate performance in the governor's race in which he insisted he was pro-choice, his mother was pro-choice, and he's always been pro-choice.
I'm a reluctant supporter of Santorum. I am a strong opponent of Romney.
I can live with voting for Gingrich. I really, really hope the Republican Party doesn't put me in a position of having to decide whether to vote for Romney or Obama.
38 posted on Tuesday, January 31, 2012 9:17:47 PM by ansel12: “Rush told us today that most Santorum voters, support Romney as their second choice.”
I'd like to see Rush Limbaugh's research, especially since his brother is endorsing Santorum. I realize he has access to data that may not be public knowledge.
However, the polls that are so far public don’t seem to bear this out. CharlesWayneCT has some interesting data showing that Santorum voters are split on their second choice about evenly between Romney and Gingrich.
Poll and commentary here:
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/news/2840285/posts?page=58#58
I’m not sure that the claim that most Santorum voters support ROmney was actually a claim made by Rush or not.
I’m also not sure whether that is supposed to help in the fight to remove Santorum or not, since if he’s taking most of the votes from Romney, you’d think that we’d want him to stay in the race.
I think the argument is that since Santorum voters would pick Romney over Gingrich, Santorum must be a liberal stalking horse for Romney. But again, if it was true, and Santorum was doing the work of Romney, he’d drop out and give all those votes to Romney. If Santorum had not been in FLorida, Romney would have won a clear majority, rather than still being a minority winner. I’ll let a GIngrich supporter explain how that outcome would be better for Gingrich, or worse for Romney.
Likewise, are there people here who support Romney, but telling people to vote for Santorum? I guess it is possible, but Romney doesn’t need Santorum to have supporters at Free Republic, so the logic of that argument eludes me. If the argument is that people who supported Romney in 2008 are supporting Santorum in 2012, that could also be true, but given that Cain endorsed Romney in 2008 and supports Gingrich now, I don’t think it is helpful to argue that a candidate should be measured by who their supporters were supporting 4 years ago.
I think Gingrich would be HAPPY to get every freeper who supported Romney to now support him. And since Gingrich supporters are asking Santorum supporters to switch, they apparently think it would be great if these “pro-Romney” people they are talking about started supporting Newt Gingrich instead.
The one thing I think I can say is that by self-selection, FR isn’t a good representation of the republican electorate or the conservative component of the electorate. I don’t think it wants to be, or that this is a problem, so long as Freepers don’t forget that and start scratching their heads wondering why the rest of the electorate is doing what they are doing.