Faulty math? Rick Santorum’s campaign argues he’s closer in delegate race than you think

Rick Santorum's campaign insists it's not focused on delegate math. But that didn't stop his top political advisers from holding a nearly hour-long conference call on the very subject Tuesday, in which they insisted that Santorum isn't losing as badly to Mitt Romney in the delegate count as some project.

Just hours before the polls in Illinois' Republican primary are set to close, Santorum's advisers argued that the former Pennsylvania senator lags behind Romney by just 124 delegates—311 to Romney's 435. That's a major difference from what several news organizations, including the Associated Press, have projected. According to AP, Romney leads the field with 521 delegates, compared to Santorum's 253. Newt Gingrich trails with 136, followed by Ron Paul, who has 50, according to AP.

So how does Team Santorum rectify the math discrepancy? John Yob, a Santorum adviser overseeing delegate strategy, argued that his boss is doing better than those projections, in part because he's "over-performing" in ongoing county and district conventions in places like Iowa, Missouri and Washington state, which will ultimately determine who wins the majority of delegates out of those states.

Yob predicted that Romney would emerge from Iowa with no delegates at all—in spite of his second place photo finish with Santorum in January's caucuses. But when questioned on which delegates were planning to switch support from Romney to Santorum, he declined to release "identification data" to prove Romney's collapse in Iowa or in other states. His argument is the direct opposite of what the Romney campaign has contended. In a background briefing with reporters two weeks ago, Romney advisers argued that their candidate will emerge with more delegates from Iowa than Santorum.

But that's not the only sign of wishful thinking from the Santorum campaign. His advisers believe that delegate counts in key states like Arizona and Florida will eventually go their way. Romney won 50 delegates in Florida and another 29 in Arizona because they were deemed "winner take all" states. But Santorum's campaign is fighting to have those delegates allocated proportionally because of Republican National Committee rules that blocked any "winner take all" elections before April 1.

Yet there's been no strong push for Arizona or Florida to recalculate its delegates. A decision, if one were to come, wouldn't happen until at least the GOP convention—though Yob insisted the campaign would be willing to fight it out there, predicting that none of the GOP candidates would have assembled the 1,144 necessary delegates to clinch the nomination by then, anyway.

Meanwhile, in Michigan, the Santorum campaign is disputing election results that gave Romney two extra at-large delegates—accusing the Romney campaign and its surrogates of trying to change rules to its favor after the fact.

"To go back and try to change the game after it's over is the worst of the worst in politics, Santorum strategist Hogan Gidley declared. "That's something that happens in Iran. It doesn't happen here."

After all that, Santorum advisers insisted they weren't caught up in the mathematical calculations of how their candidate gets the delegates he needs to win the nomination. "We are not focused on delegate math," Yob insisted at one point. "We're focused on the long haul."

But the campaign said it was forced to address the issue because of Romney's focus on the issue. The Santorum campaign's delegate count "relates to the rules as they currently are," Gidley told reporters, and is not an attempt to "change the perception of reality."

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