With Democrats promising to spend hundreds of millions in a determined bid to recapture the House, and with Republicans mounting a supreme effort to win the four Democratic seats they need to win control of the Senate, the members of Congress naturally want a candidate at the top of the ticket who will make their own races easier, not harder. Even veteran incumbents with only token opposition still care deeply about the overall outcome: if the GOP loses the House, then Republicans must give up all the committee chairmanships and other prerogatives of power they currently enjoy.
Moreover, some strategists and activists worry that a Santorum nomination could damage the GOP brand in a way that would continue to harm the GOP cause for a generation. The former senator appears appallingly eager to entangle himself with a cluster of controversies that would make him especially unpalatable to younger voters. His enthusiastic insistence on condemning contraception (even while saying he’ll do nothing to restrict it), as well as making disapproving (and utterly unnecessary) comments about prenatal testing, women in combat, premarital sex, and the satanic takeover of Hollywood and the NBA, leave him with few supporters among the millions of Americans between 18 and 25 who may be voting for the first time in 2012.
Those votes count as especially important because once a young person identifies with a political party it shapes a habit that influences future choices…
Even for Republicans who assume that any nominee would lose to Obama, it therefore makes sense to fear a Santorum catastrophe (like Goldwater’s devastating, across-the-board wipeout in ’64) more than a more conventional defeat for Romney (perhaps in the style of Bob Dole in ’96, when the GOP retained both houses of Congress).
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