santorum right now. he s joining us. senator santorum, you want to quickly respond to that endorsement of mitt romney four years ago? because romney, as you heard, is having some fun with it. in fact, i ll play the clip, if you want to hear it. listen to this. senator santorum was kind enough to endorse me last time around. i appreciate that. and and we ve been friends. i can tell you that our backgrounds are quite different. like speaker gingrich, senator tan tor um has spent his career in government, in washington. nothing wrong with that. but it s a very different background that i have. he listed you as a washington insider like newt gingrich. go ahead, senator santorum. speak directly to mitt romney. first off, i endorsed mitt romney i think five days before super tuesday. i didn t endorse anybody for a long time. my focus in the 2008 election was on making sure that we had someone other than john mccain. that is what i was publicly
evangelicals agreed on one candidate. that was mike huckabee. and that gave him the iowa caucuses. it gave him his victory. didn t give him the nomination as we pointed out tonight. but so important to his win and so important to romney s loss. he cannot count on evangelicals this time around. now, okay. when you look at this, one thing you can say if you look back at 2008, mitt romney did very well with people who didn t identify themselves as evangelicals as indeed he appears to be doing this time around. exactly. but he is a mormon. remember that. that s a problem. maybe he is playing that a little bit differently this time. well, i mean, take a look at this field. you see that the support of evangelical christians, santorum does very well. he s been endorsed by two leading evangelicals. but they don t have one horse this time. there is no mike huckabee. and that s good for mitt romney. so they re split.
registered poll say people are still persuadable. they might change their minds going into the caucus. that s right. i was saying with erin earlier, this isn t like you go into the booth and just pull a lever and say, okay, fine. you actually listened to people talk about their candidates. the important thing about organization is that rick santorum if he has a good organization, will have people speaking on his behalf at these caucuses. and it could make a difference. another important thing for him is those endorsements of two leading evangelicals. there s no single evangelical candidate but these two people carry a lot of weight in the state. i think that will be important. i think, john, he also learned the gingrich lesson that if you re going to be bombarded with negative attacks you better respond. and he surged at the right time. before a real onslaught of negative ads could take him out. that s exactly right. caucuses are high intensity, low turnout elections fundamentall
interesting here as we go through these questions. the next one i want to show by the way, i like that, how i just trash it. who is the most consistent. this is interesting. you also see santorum scoring about the same as mitt romney. sure. ron paul, i guess this isn t surprising, right? he has been very consistent over the years. as dana bash was pointing out, ron paul has an agenda. small government. get rid of the debt. get out of the wars. easy to say. easy to understand. consistency. and either you like it or you don t. interesting that romney with all the the finger pointing on flip-flopping and, okay, you had this view on abortion, now you have that view, still coming in second. santorum has that problem, too. the other candidates are pointing out, well, maybe you re not so conservative. maybe you were for those earmarks. he said, yes, i was. i ve made some mistakes. there s a question with that, too, for santorum. i m going to trash this one because this one is
that. he said in your interview there, i think you ve got something important, that he wasn t expecting to finish third. he may well do that. and i think that s going to depress his fundraising and make him less relevant. reporter: i thought that was a mistake, too, when i heard it from paul saying i don t think i m going to place third. it ll be first or second. is there life for ron paul after this campaign after iowa if he comes in third to rick santorum and mitt romney? like jesse jackson in the democratic party in the 1980s, he is the kind of candidate who can go on for a long time because he has a deeply committed base. this is kind of the paradox of these purely id lodge these candidates with a very pure ideology. they appeal to a certain segment of the elect rat who likes the purity, the consistency across all issues. then you run into someone like i ran into today at a mitt romney event in iowa. i agree with him on the economy. on foreign policy he s nuts. you have tha