Skip to footer

Southern stumbles aside, Mitt Romney bests Santorum in new national poll

A Pew Research poll released Wednesday has some good news and some bad news for Mitt Romney, the day after his third-place finishes in the Alabama and Mississippi primaries. 

|
Courtesy of Pew Research Center
Andrew Kohut, president of the Pew Research Center.
  • By Dave Cook Staff writer

| Washington

A national poll of voters released Wednesday offers mixed news for Republican presidential front-runner Mitt Romney after his third-place finish Tuesday in Southern primaries in Alabama and Mississippi.

“The headline is that Romney regained his lead over [GOP challenger Rick] Santorum 33 to 24 percent” among Republican and Republican-leaning voters, says Andrew Kohut, president of the Pew Research Center. Last month, the two GOP candidates were split fairly evenly in the GOP presidential race, Mr. Kohut said, at “28 percent Romney, 30 percent Santorum.” 

While Mr. Romney, a former governor of Massachusetts, is “back on top in this particular national poll,” he “now trails [President] Obama by an ever larger margin” in a theoretical matchup, Kohut said at a Monitor-hosted breakfast for reporters. 

In a head-to-head matchup, Mr. Obama topped Romney by 54 to 42 percent, the Pew survey showed. The president has an even bigger lead over Mr. Santorum, a former US senator from Pennsylvania, outpacing him 57 to 39 percent.

The nonpartisan research organization found what Kohut called “a cavernous gender gap in the horse-race poll…. Obama leads Romney by 20 points among female voters. And he leads Santorum by 26 points among female voters.”

Women's views of the parties did not shift significantly between February and March, when a controversy erupted over how contraception would be treated under Obama's health-care reform law, said Michael Dimock, Pew’s associate director of research.

For the moment, Democratic voters express more confidence that Obama will win reelection in November than Republicans do that their candidate will prevail, says Kohut.

“More than 80 percent of Democrats anticipate a victory for Obama regardless of [Republican] candidate," he said. "But Republicans have mixed views.  Just 60 percent of Republicans think that Romney will beat Obama, and only 46 percent think that Santorum will beat Obama.”

The survey, based on telephone interviews conducted March 7-11, has an overall margin of error of plus or minus 3 percentage points. 

You've read  of  free articles. Subscribe to continue.
Real news can be honest, hopeful, credible, constructive.
What is the Monitor difference? Tackling the tough headlines – with humanity. Listening to sources – with respect. Seeing the story that others are missing by reporting what so often gets overlooked: the values that connect us. That’s Monitor reporting – news that changes how you see the world.
editor@csmonitor.com
Subscribe
Mark Sappenfield
Editor

Dear Reader,

About a year ago, I happened upon this statement about the Monitor in the Harvard Business Review – under the charming heading of “do things that don’t interest you”:

“Many things that end up” being meaningful, writes social scientist Joseph Grenny, “have come from conference workshops, articles, or online videos that began as a chore and ended with an insight. My work in Kenya, for example, was heavily influenced by a Christian Science Monitor article I had forced myself to read 10 years earlier. Sometimes, we call things ‘boring’ simply because they lie outside the box we are currently in.”

If you were to come up with a punchline to a joke about the Monitor, that would probably be it. We’re seen as being global, fair, insightful, and perhaps a bit too earnest. We’re the bran muffin of journalism.

But you know what? We change lives. And I’m going to argue that we change lives precisely because we force open that too-small box that most human beings think they live in.

The Monitor is a peculiar little publication that’s hard for the world to figure out. We’re run by a church, but we’re not only for church members and we’re not about converting people. We’re known as being fair even as the world becomes as polarized as at any time since the newspaper’s founding in 1908.

We have a mission beyond circulation, we want to bridge divides. We’re about kicking down the door of thought everywhere and saying, “You are bigger and more capable than you realize. And we can prove it.”

If you’re looking for bran muffin journalism, you can subscribe to the Monitor for $15. You’ll get the Monitor Weekly magazine, the Monitor Daily email, and unlimited access to CSMonitor.com.

Subscribe to insightful journalism

QR Code to Southern stumbles aside, Mitt Romney bests Santorum in new national poll
Read this article in
https://www.csmonitor.com/USA/Politics/monitor_breakfast/2012/0314/Southern-stumbles-aside-Mitt-Romney-bests-Santorum-in-new-national-poll
QR Code to Subscription page
Start your subscription today
https://www.csmonitor.com/subscribe