Rick Santorum made an appearance on radio today, and during the interview he not only called for Newt Gingrich to exit the race but he also said that he would not rule out taking the race to a brokered convention.
Glenn started off the interview by asking Santorum what he needed to do in order to win, and Santorum said that after tonight the race should strictly be a two-person race.
"Congressman Gingrich has really shown no ability to get votes outside of the State of Georgia and, you know, those primaries are all over. All the states that border Georgia are now, as of today, will have had their primaries," Santorum told Glenn. The only exception of the deep South region is Louisiana, and Santorum will be in that state tonight.
" We think we're going to do exceptionally well in Louisiana and, you know, we are now going to go into states that are much more, you know, we've done very well. Illinois is next. The polls there are showing Romney and I running at a dead heat race with Gingrich about 20 points behind the two of us. And whether he does well or not, I don't think it's going to matter much," Santorum.
Santorum also told Glenn that Gingrich is "just not attracting votes anywhere else" and that "it would be great if he would get out of the race because clearly the vast majority of the votes that he is taking are coming from me."
Santorum told Glenn that Gingrich is only staying in because he think he can win a brokered convention.
And while Santorum doesn't think that Gingrich could win a brokered convention, he did think that his own campaign stood a chance against Romney's "phony math".
"You see all this math that Romney has. It's phony math. So many of the delegates that are elected are not committed delegates. They are not bound, officially bound," Santorum said.
"These caucuses we have no idea really. We did very well in Kansas. There's very good chance, you know, in Iowa, for example, we had a caucus there a while back, but there's a good chance we'll get about 80% of the delegates, maybe even 90% of the delegates out of the State of Iowa, even though we only got a bare majority of the straw poll vote. Those are presidential preference polls that are not directly tied to delegate selection. We went out and worked all of these caucuses and I've done a fabulous job of getting delegates elected and so we're going to ‑‑ our numbers are much better than what's being shown in these delegate counts, and Governor Romney's are much softer than those being shown on these delegate counts. We have a long way to go. We continue to pick up the momentum that we have and get a real ‑‑ whether Gingrich is in the race or not, after today it's going to be a one‑on‑one race. It's going to be seen that way and we're going to start winning primaries. We start winning primaries and caucuses in greater numbers as we have in the last couple of days. We're going to get this nomination," Santourm added.
But what would a brokered, or as Santorum said "open", convention be like?
"If this race continues on the path it's on right now and Gingrich stays in the race, which seems like he's inevitable to do, it's highly unlikely someone is going to get to that, to that magic number," Santorum said of the delegates needed to clinch the nomination.
"And then you go with there nobody having the committed number of delegates to be able to win and what happens in these later races as we go down the stretch, whether it's Pennsylvania or Texas or California, some of these big states, you know, who wins and who has momentum going into that convention is going to have a huge, huge, huge role to play as to who is the best person to line up against Obama. And I think a lot of conservatives are saying what you're saying which is Mitt Romney is uniquely disqualified to take on Obama on the issues. He gives away too much of the important issues that are going to motivate our base and draw the clear distinctions between President Obama on the issues of importance to the people."
Glenn, however, felt that a brokered convention would be bad for the Republican party going into November.
"It's time to move forward, sure, I'd like everybody to drop out of the race and support me. But if we put up a candidate who is uniquely disqualified to take President Obama on the biggest issues of the day, moving forward is moving backwards. We've got to nominate a conservative. If we don't nominate a conservative, we're not going to win this election. And we've seen that. Every time we nominate a moderate that the media and the pundits want us to do, whether it's McCain, whether it's Dole or whether it was Bush for reelection in '92 or whether it was Jerry Ford in '76, we lose and we lose badly. We have to have a candidate that draws clear, sharp lines and between the left and where we want to take America and Governor Romney just simply can't do that," Santorum said.
"I hate the fact that you're talking me back onto the bandwagon. I want to get back off the bandwagon!" Glenn joked.
Santorum did say that by not having a nominee at this point, the Obama campaign does not have a clear person to target. He said that this is a potential advantage for the eventual GOP nominee.
