Pennsylvania Politics -- Santorum in Trouble

The latest USA Today/Gallup poll shows Rick Santorum trailing Bob Casey by a whopping eighteen points -- 56-38% among likely voters. [here] This is probably an outlier, but more ominous is the trend charted by pollster.com. It shows the average of the past five polls to be a nine point gap favoring Casey, 49-40 percent. This is exactly the same gap as shown by the average of the past ten polls. This suggests that Casey's lead is locked in and that Santorum is not making any real headway, despite his early media campaign -- and time is running out.

Rick desperately needs to shake things up. Right now he's counting on Sunday's "Meet the Press" confrontation to do just that. It will be interesting to check next week's polls to see just what difference the TV exposure will have.

RELATED:

The Washington Times reports that internal polling by the Santorum campaign shows that the one issue that really resonates with Pennsylvania voters and clearly differentiates him from Bob Casey is immigration.

"We did a certain amount of internal polling, and when it got to immigration, it was very clear," Mr. Braybender said. "Rick's position versus Casey's was overwhelming."
Voters, he said, see the issue as more than just illegal aliens streaming across the border. It's also about giving them Social Security benefits, waiving certain back taxes and other matters of lawfulness and fairness. In one ad released recently, Mr. Santorum tells viewers about his own immigrant background, but uses the opportunity to point out that his grandparents came here legally and obeyed all the immigration laws.
"If Casey or anyone else thinks this is not an issue in Pennsylvania, they should start talking to voters," Mr. Braybender said.

Read it here.