Moral Conservatives Spark the Santorum Surge
by Michael Tesler in Model Politics
Rick Santorum’s meteoric rise in the national polls following his surprise February 7th wins in Minnesota, Missouri and Missouri naturally begs the question, “Where did the Santorum surge come from?” My analysis of a nationally representative re-interview survey conducted by YouGov last week (respondents were first interviewed in January 2012) indicates that Santorum has his morally conservative brethren to thank for this front-runner status. Santorum support, not surprisingly, increased rather dramatically among these panelists who were interviewed in both January and February (from 16 to 30 percent). More importantly for our present purposes, the figure below shows that this ... read more