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There Is No Republican Front-runner

No one really accepts Santorum as the "heir apparent."

John Stoehr thinks Santorum should be considered the Republican frontrunner for 2016:

Santorum is not only the heir apparent; he’s also a hard-core conservative who won’t have the obvious vulnerabilities that doomed Dole, McCain and Romney. The last runner-up to embody the imprimatur of the establishment as well as the conservative base was Ronald Reagan.

The trouble with this is that the party’s “heir apparent” is only recognized as such when the party’s leaders accept him in this role. No one really accepts Santorum as the “heir apparent,” and one reason for this is that most Republicans understand that his status as the runner-up in 2012 was a monumental fluke. He happened to be the last major anti-Romney available after every single alternative was tested and found wanting. The reason that he was available during the later contests in 2012 was that he had been written off as a hopeless candidate. The truth was that he was still a hopeless candidate, but was propelled by the deep dissatisfaction with Romney into being a briefly competitive challenger. In other words, he doesn’t have the “imprimatur of the establishment,” and was never going to receive it.

Santorum is better-known now than he was in 2011, but that is mostly because he had mostly been forgotten in between his 2006 defeat and the start of the primary debates. He could never get past the fact that he lost his Senate re-election bid in a blowout. That is what rightly causes people to dismiss him from consideration as a plausible nominee then and now. Candidates that lose their last general election in a landslide typically don’t get promoted to either spot on the top ticket. People reasonably assume that anyone that unpopular in his own state would be a non-starter as a national candidate, and they are right to assume that. Santorum has come out so aggressively against other would-be 2016 candidates this week because that is the only way he can get anyone to pay attention to him. He’s not “reclaiming his place in the party order.” He’s desperately trying to be seen as relevant by a party that knows he isn’t.

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