… On February 7, Santorum won the Colorado and Minnesota caucuses as well as the nonbinding Missouri primary. Santorum beat Romney by almost 6 points in Colorado and by almost 30 points in both Minnesota and Missouri. …
With so little pre-election polling and no exit polls in these three states, we cannot definitively establish how much their electorates were tilted toward evangelicals or any other constituency favorable to Santorum. But even if we assume that there was such a tilt, it alone was not sufficient to explain Santorum’s success. After all, Santorum had received relatively little national media coverage since the New Hampshire primary, and he received very little immediately before the Colorado, Minnesota, and Missouri contests. These three states may have had a larger-than-average share of potential Santorum voters, but that could not explain why they became actual Santorum voters. [cont.]
Excerpted from The Gamble: Choice and Chance in the 2012 Presidential Election, by John Sides (GWU) & Lynn Vavreck (UCLA), Salon