"He made a mistake with Sen. Specter that cost him dearly and it could very well cost him again," said Mitch Cooper, the Republican sheriff of Blair County in conservative central Pennsylvania, who is undecided in the presidential race.
Santorum's chances will turn on his ability to offset Romney's strength in the moderate Philadelphia suburbs by running up large margins in the rest of the state.
At Santorum's first central Pennsylvania campaign stop, a rally last week at the courthouse in Hollidaysburg, he reached out to social conservatives and blue-collar voters, reminiscing about his first kill as a deer hunter and his grandfather's work in nearby coal mines.
Then he turned to an incendiary remark Barack Obama made during his 2008 campaign, at a fundraiser in Northern California, about the hard-pressed residents of small Pennsylvania towns. ("They get bitter. They cling to guns or religion," Obama said.)
"You're damn right we do!" Santorum declared, to applause. "We cling to our faith. We cling to the rights that are God-given, that are guaranteed under our Constitution, including the right to protect ourselves and those we love with the 2nd Amendment, an individual right to bear arms."
He went on to attack Romney's past support for gun control. Playing up cultural contrasts with the former Massachusetts governor is a central theme of Santorum's return engagement with Pennsylvania voters. Adopting the image of a scrappy outsider, he described himself to reporters as someone who "clawed his way up through the political process, never being anybody's favorite, always being the underdog, always being someone that was discounted. I think folks in Pennsylvania for a long time have admired that story and can relate to that story, and I think they will again in this election cycle."
