Rick Santorum's Weaknesses

Curious Capitalist is officially endorsing Rick Santorum for the 2012 GOP Nomination.  I have been supporting Rick since Iowa and then I stopped.  Then I started again, right after the Nevada caucuses.

Despite his rise in the polls, there is a lot not to like about the Rick Santorum train.  As discussed in an earlier post, Santorum and Santorum's most generous supporter seem to both have Santorum of the mouth.  Unfortunately, Santorum has been getting more media coverage lately over this as well.

Santorum's campaign cannot seem to impose its will in contests.  He is not on the ballot on key states such as Virginia and Indiana.  He did not even fill out full delegate slates for Ohio, a state he is expected to win.  Unlike the Paul and Romney campaign, the Santorum campaign might not be fully equipped to fight for delegates at the various county and state conventions where delegate battles are likely to be fought.  The make matters worse, each state has its own set of rules over how delegates are picked and whether delegates are binding or non-binding.  In Santorum's MO, MN, and CO wins, CO and MN are both non-binding delegate states where delegates are selected in a convoluted convention based process.  MO was simply a beauty contest with no delegates at stake.  Because Santorum's campaign has demonstrated a lack of competence in picking up delegates, he will likely underperform with delegates in relation to his proportion of the vote.

This development is very key to watch, we could have a scenario where Santorum won more votes but Romney has more delegates.

It is also very puzzling to notice that GOP senators who served with Rick Santorum are not endorsing him en mass.  He only has one, Mike DeWine, who had previously endorsed Pawlenty and Romney.  This probably means that Rick Santorum isn't too popular or awesome when he was a senator.