Four years ago I greeted Rick Santorum’s entry into the 2012 Republican presidential race by comparing him to his favorite baseball team, the Pittsburgh Pirates. Just as those perennial cellar-dwellers could be in first place on Opening Day of the baseball season, so, too, I joked, could Santorum claim to have a legitimate shot at the presidency only on the day he declared his candidacy. But the following winter Santorum made me (and just about everybody else) eat crow as he came out of nowhere to win 11 primaries and caucuses to be the runner-up to Mitt Romney (and, yes, in the intervening years, the Pirates have become a playoff team too just to make my prediction completely ridiculous). The memory of that inspiring effort has impelled Santorum and a few other candidates who must be considered long shots at best to try in 2016. In a much larger field without any real frontrunner like Romney, perhaps it’s not entirely unreasonable for Santorum and the likes of Lindsey Graham and George Pataki to think they too can come from out of nowhere next year and make a splash. But nevertheless, you have to wonder exactly what any of these characters are smoking to make them think that they aren’t wasting their time.
Santorum’s 2016 effort is noteworthy because it is likely to put to bed forever the notion that the runner up in a GOP presidential race automatically becomes a front runner the second time around. Ronald Reagan, George H.W. Bush, Bob Dole and John McCain all succeeded in winning the nomination after prior losing efforts. But Santorum’s chances of following in their footsteps must be evaluated as being slim and none. While he wound up having the social conservative vote to himself in 2012, the competition for a demographic that can be decisive, especially in the Iowa Caucus, is much stiffer this time with Ted Cruz, Mike Huckabee (another candidate hoping to recapture past glories in Iowa), Bobby Jindal and Rick Perry all claiming the same mantle
The field is deeper this time with a bevy of serious candidates as well as interesting outsiders. Though neither Carly Fiorina nor Ben Carson are likely to win, they may provide some energy that some of the less likely 2012 candidates lacked. Rand Paul may not now be in as strong a position as he thought he would be, but he’s still taken more seriously than his father Ron was in 2012. More mainstream candidates like Scott Walker, Marco Rubio, and Jeb Bush all have their weaknesses but all will have enough money to run competitive campaigns.
Nevertheless, Santorum does bring to the table a coherent approach to the race. He’s betting not only on retaining social conservatives but being able to position himself as the champion of working class Americans. The former Pennsylvania senator rightly chided the GOP for appealing only to business in 2012 and forgetting those at the base of the economic pyramid. But the problem there is that he isn’t running only against a plutocrat like Romney or even Bush, but against men like Walker, Rubio or Cruz whose origins are as humble as his own.
Thus, while Santorum may think he earned the right for another shot with his strong showing last time, it’s not clear that there is anything like a path to victory or even contention for him.
But however scant his chances will be, he looks like a favorite when compared to Pataki. The three-time New York governor has a resume of winning tough races (he’s the one who retired the late Mario Cuomo in 1994) but he left his party in ruins when he left office in 2006 and since then the New York GOP has been a joke. Though his record in office looks good compared to some of his successors, he was no model of conservative governance. Since then, he’s been out of both politics and the public eye. He has neither an ideological raison d’être nor a compelling life story or personality. The only thing his candidacy indicates is that it’s sometimes very hard for some politicians to accept the fact that their moment in the sun is truly over.
Graham is another candidate without a path to the nomination. Though a respected voice on defense issues, he is disliked by the party base for his stand on immigration. He mainly seems to be there to debate Rand Paul about foreign policy. But since it seems highly unlikely that he can break into the top ten in poll ratings, he probably won’t even get that chance because of the debate rules intended to avoid having 20 people on the stage.
All of these candidates have candidates have every right to take their chances and run if they like. And if donors are foolish enough to give them money, they can keep running until they flop in the early primaries and leave the podium to the ones with more credible chances of winning.
What makes them do it? Call it ego or the lure of the big stage. Perhaps some are delusional enough to think they can win. But though I’m taking the chance of making the same mistake with them that I made with Santorum, what I said about him in 2011 applies to him and a number of his fellow hopefuls: the high point of their candidacies is likely to be to their announcements.
