Presidential primary to start tonight

A Republican presidential candidate and Pitt graduate offered two words to his supporters as he… A Republican presidential candidate and Pitt graduate offered two words to his supporters as he began his celebratory speech last Tuesday night.

“Game on,” former Pennsylvania Sen. Rick Santorum said while the results came in that he had placed second in the Iowa caucuses, a mere eight votes behind fellow Republican candidate Mitt Romney.

But Santorum’s brief hoorah ended as he hopped back on the campaign trail with the New Hampshire primaries quickly approaching. The 2012 presidential primary season will kick off Tuesday night in the Granite State, with the number of Republican candidates slimmed down to six after Minnesota Rep. Michele Bachmann dropped out of the race.

Casey Rankin, the newly elected president of the Pitt College Republicans, said that he does not believe the Iowa caucuses can accurately predict the winner of the Republican primaries.

“I think [the Iowa caucuses] have a more narrowing effect than they do actually choosing someone. Essentially, it gives someone like Rick Santorum a chance to compete on a more national level,” he said.

According to a pre-New Hampshire primary Gallup poll, Romney appears to be the current Republican front-runner in the state, receiving 30 percent of ballot support between Jan. 1 and Jan. 7. Santorum ranked in second and received 18 percent, with former House Speaker Newt Gingrich right behind him with 17 percent.

So far, thhe results of the Iowa caucuses and polling data have aligned with the general sentiments of the Pitt College Republicans, who took a straw poll of their members earlier in the semester. The majority of the group chose Romney, the former Massachusetts governor, as the Republican candidate they would like to see as the future president.

The majority of the group did not align with the candidate that calls Pennsylvania home, and Rankin said it’s because Santorum hasn’t been as present in his home state since he left the Senate ­— though his campaign is based out of Verona, Pa.

“Santorum really hasn’t been in Pennsylvania full time since he lost his election as senator in 2006,” Rankin said. “I guess there’s more a degree of familiarity [with Santorum in Pennsylvania] than there are with some of the lesser-known candidates, but compared to the ones who are more nationally known — like Romney or Gingrich — as a whole, people know less about him. He has been out of office for six years now and hasn’t really been on the forefront up until this year.”

Santorum graduated with a master’s degree in business administration from Pitt in 1981, and after receiving his Juris doctorate from Penn State’s Dickinson School of Law, he worked for K&L Gates law firm in Pittsburgh throughout the latter part of the 1980s.

“I share the values of the working people in that district,” Santorum said last Tuesday night, speaking about his own Pennsylvania district. “If we have someone that can go out to Western Pennsylvania and Ohio and Indiana and Michigan and Iowa and Missouri and appeal to the voters that have been left behind by a Democratic Party that wants to make them dependent instead of valuing their work, we will win this election.”

A representative from Santorum’s campaign could not be reached for comment.

Pat Dunham, chair of Duquesne University’s political science department, said that what separated Santorum from the other candidates in the Iowa caucuses was that he visited all of the counties to campaign. Other candidates relied on television ads and appearances on cable television shows to gain support.

Dunham said that Iowa is used to “retail politics,” where voters get to see the candidates up close and personal, and this might have been a factor that played into Santorum’s success in the caucuses. Dunham also said that Santorum’s issue positions appeal to evangelical voters and that many voters who participate in the Iowa Republican caucuses are evangelicals.

“Iowa is a small state. Not a lot of delegates are chosen there,” Dunham said. “The importance [of the Iowa caucuses] gets magnified by the media because, for the first time after months of campaigning, we actually get to hear from the voters.”