It’s been a while since we talked about our old friend Sen. Rick “Man on Dog” Santorum. With this in mind, I appreciate long-time Carpetbagger friend Chief Osceola for giving me a heads up on the latest news out of the Keystone State.<\/p>\n
You probably remember that Santorum got into a little trouble last month<\/a> when he compared gays to adulterers and bigamists, arguing that gays can and should be arrested for their private conduct because he rejects the notion of a right to privacy<\/a>.<\/p>\n It’s worth noting that Pennsylvania is a fairly odd state when it comes to political identity. It tends to vote Democratic, but more often than not, it’s up-for-grabs. Gore won Pennsylvania in 2000 and the state has a popular Democratic governor, but both of the state’s senators are Republican. To be sure, the state’s two major population bases — Philadelphia on the east and Pittsburgh on the west — are heavily Democratic, but the center of the state is extremely conservative. James Carville once said of Pennsylvania, “It’s Philadelphia and Pittsburgh with Alabama in the middle.”<\/p>\n It was therefore interesting to see how the controversy affected Santorum back home. A new poll<\/a> suggests little effect on his overall popularity, but there are signs of trouble for him.<\/p>\n A statewide poll conducted by the Quinnipiac University Polling Institute showed Santorum’s approval rating at 55 percent, exactly where it was before the anti-gay, anti-privacy controversy erupted.<\/p>\n The main difference, however, is that before the flap, Santorum had a disapproval rating of 20 percent, with 24 percent undecided. Now it’s a different story, with the disapproval rating jumping to 33 percent.<\/p>\n In case you’re interested, Santorum won’t be up for re-election until 2006, and by then voters in Pennsylvania probably will have long forgotten about this controversy. Nevertheless, the senator is helping to build a base of voters who dislike him. I know it’s a long time away, but I’d love to see Ed Rendell<\/a> run against him in three years.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" It’s been a while since we talked about our old friend Sen. Rick “Man on Dog” Santorum. With this in mind, I appreciate long-time Carpetbagger friend Chief Osceola for giving me a heads up on the latest news out of the Keystone State. You probably remember that Santorum got into a little trouble last month […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[617],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-81","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-general"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/81","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=81"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/81\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=81"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=81"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=81"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}