Sorry Santorum, You’re not Going to Win

Don’t listen to the voices pushing Rick Santorum as a potential nominee for the Republicans in 2016. The controversial Senator’s political career has been over for a while.

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Another August, another series of dubious political theories churned out to fill space up at news outlets while Congress is in recess and Americans go on vacation. A recent trend circulating around the web is the argument for the former Republican senator from Pennsylvania Rick Santorum as a potential 2016 Republican nominee for president. At the conservative Washington Examiner Byron York has gone so far as to float Santorum as a potential front runner. Not to dash Rick’s hopes, but the truth is that while he may have a long career ahead of him in conservative punditry or anti-abortion crusades, as a candidate for president, he’s almost certainly toast.

On the surface Santorum has a lot of the conventional qualifications you’d look for in a potential presidential nominee. He served as a senator from a key battle ground state for 12 years while also rising quite high in the Republican leadership. In addition, he is quite well known among circles inside the Republican Party and with his record of inflammatory rhetoric and a confrontational political style, he would seemingly make a good match for the current Republican Party that abhors compromise and accommodation with Democrats. Unfortunately for Rick, these credentials are nowhere near enough. In order to win the nomination, Santorum would have to convince a range of actors inside the Republican Party to support him, and there’s no evidence that this would happen in 2016 or any other election cycle for that matter. In fact, the evidence strongly points to Santorum being considered unacceptable by too many people inside the GOP to ever let him win the nomination.

Back in 2008 four political scientists wrote a book called The Party Decides: Presidential Nominations Before and After Reform about the modern presidential nominations process. They argued that presidential nominees are not chosen by voters in primaries and caucuses or by the drama of dueling campaigns attempting to out maneuver each other.  Instead nominees are chosen in a process often called the “invisible primary” that happens long before anyone goes to the polls in Iowa or New Hampshire. In essence, political parties have a “long running national conversation” about who would advance their collective agenda and make the best standard bearer in the election and use their collective political clout to make sure that person wins the nomination. The conversation is carried amongst “party actors” or inside the “expanded party network” which includes people and groups with a lot of influence like interest groups or elected officials, as well as a multitude of less influential but still important groups like party activists and campaign donors. These party actors collectively pick a candidate that will strike a balance between keeping party actors happy on the issues and a candidate who will also, in theory at least, advance the party’s interest as a whole. That is, win the election.

I find this “Party Decides” model to be one of the most helpful ways to think about how presidential nomination races shake out. The reason that all the major Democratic nominees in the 2008 cycle supported some kind of health care reform wasn’t just chance. Instead it was because powerful actors inside the Democratic party (liberal activists, organized labor) demanded it of any potential nominee. The result was that to be the Democratic nominee you had to have a plan to reform the health care system. Accordingly, all the Democratic candidates for the nomination took that stance and came up with some sort of plan. Likewise to be a Republican nominee you have to be pro-life and hawkish on national defense because powerful groups inside the GOP consider being pro-choice or an isolationist to be a deal breaker.

The “Party Decides” model helps to show how big Santorum’s problems were back in the 2012 cycle. If he had been an acceptable pick to Republican party actors his big upset in the Iowa Caucuses or his February 7 sweep of Colorado, Missouri and Minnesota should have led to a wave of support in things like positive statements about him, endorsements from other Republican politicians and money from influential donors. But that’s not what happened at all. Instead, Republican party actors rallied around Mitt Romney even more, which shouldn’t surprise anyone as that’s what they had been doing for some time. So while Santorum surprised the press with his big wins, those wins didn’t change the outcome of the contest at all.

In short, Republican party actors had plenty of chances to rally behind Santorum if they liked him or thought he’d be a good standard bearer for their party, but in 2012 they decided over and over again not to. Maybe because of his hardline stance on social issues, maybe because he’s been out of government since 2006 or maybe because they think that a two term senator that loses reelection by 18 percent just doesn’t have the political skills to compete in the major league of presidential politics. Whatever the reason, Rick would be well advised to hang up his spikes for good and look into other lines of work. His political career ended a long time ago.

Photo By Jae C. Hong/AP