Prominent evangelicals back Rick Santorum
Republican presidential candidate, former U.S. Sen. Rick Santorum greets supporters duriing a campaign stop at the Cook Out restaurant, January 13, 2012 in Gaffney, South Carolina. Voters in South Carolina will head to the polls on January 21st. to vote in the primary election to pick their choice for U.S. presidential candidate.
A group of 150 conservatives, including influential evangelical Christian leaders, endorsed Rick Santorum on Saturday in an attempt to position the former Pennsylvania senator as a more conservative alternative to leading GOP presidential candidate Mitt Romney.
They had not been expected to reach agreement on one candidate since evangelical support was splintered among Santorum, former U.S. House of Representatives Speaker Newt Gingrich and Texas Governor Rick Perry.
"What I did not think was possible appears to be possible," Tony Perkins, leader of the Family Research Council and spokesman for the group, told Reuters.
Santorum made the case for a conservative GOP candidate being able to win over Romney. "Don’t buy all this baloney that we need a moderate to win," he said. "We need someone with strong, core convictions. We can appeal to the voters in the states that we need to win, and that’s not him, that’s us."
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Romney has recently come under attack by GOP rivals and their super PACS – independent campaign groups with unlimited fundraising rights – in South Carolina. Newt Gingrich and Rick Perry have attacked Romney over his role at Bain Capital, saying he cut jobs and closed companies down for profit.
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Santorum has refrained from criticising Romney for his work at Bain Capital but has instead
tried to persuade voters that he would be a better candidate in swing states over Romney, the Los Angeles Times reported.
“I respect Mitt Romney’s career in business, but the grandson of a coalminer who grew up in public housing in a steel town in Western Pennsylvania and whose policies are oriented toward helping those and whose record is a track record of working in those blue collar communities has a much better chance of winning those states than an executive from Bain Capital,” Santorum said.