Santorum’s Main Problem is Santorum

Rick Santorum's favorite reporter, Brett Lieberman offers up another gift to Lil Ricky.

It’s all about Rick Santorum.

No matter what the Republican senator says or does or how many television ads he runs, he remains unable to sway many voters’ negative opinion about him, according to pollsters and every public poll on the U.S. Senate election.

“Santorum’s main problem is Santorum,” said Clay F. Richards, assistant director of the Quinnipiac University Polling Institute, which released a poll yesterday that shows Democrat Robert P. Casey Jr. has doubled his lead in the last month.

The Patriot-News reporter reports.

“His negatives have just wiped him out,” Richards said of Santorum.

The Quinnipiac poll, based in Hamden, Conn., which shows Casey leading 54 percent to 40 percent among likely voters, comes on the heels of several recent surveys that show millions of dollars in advertising, a focus on immigration reform and the threat of Islamic fascism have done little to help Santorum narrow the deficit.

The Other Political Junkie mentioned this recently (well, yesterday). I'm just having too much fun blogging about it.

Only about one in three Pennsylvanians has a favorable opinion of Santorum, polls say, a number that his re-election campaign has not been able to alter despite ads about his work on homeland security, welfare reform and the environment.

And

"Santorum's reputation in the state was pretty established, and there wasn't much more for people to learn," said Michael Hagen, a Temple University researcher who conducted a recent poll for The Philadelphia Inquirer that showed Casey with a 10-point lead.

Here's the part that has to worry Ricky:

Hagen said he was "astounded" when 24 percent of voters surveyed rated Santorum a zero on a scale of zero to 10. Twenty-six percent of independents -- a key group for which Casey and Santorum are competing -- rated him as zero as well.

The part that has to worry Ricky is not that Hagen was astounded, but that a quarter of the population scored him a zero out of ten. That about sums it up.

Rick Santorum - How much more can we dislike him?