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A family of three GOP delegates gets Santorum on ballot in an Ohio district
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Richard and Amy Russell, delegates for former Pennsylvania Sen. Rick Santorum in his quest for the Republican nomination for president, at their home near Bellevue, Ohio. Their son Ben is the third delegate in their district.
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BELLEVUE, Ohio -- The Republican candidates' pitched battle for Ohio's 66 delegates on Super Tuesday runs deeper than the blaring voices and glaring television lights.
The final count could come down to a click on Facebook in a log home amid the state's dormant cornfields.
A little over two months ago, former Pennsylvania Sen. Rick Santorum was considered a marginal candidate, lost in the party's crowded debates, his opinions barely sought or noted.
He didn't have the money of the other candidates and he didn't have the organization -- the paid staffers and volunteers working on his behalf to get his name out there.
Or to get his name on the ballot.
Ohio has 16 congressional districts, each of which sends three delegates to the party's national convention in Tampa in August. But the deadline for submitting delegate names was Dec. 30, long before Mr. Santorum's campaign hit its stride.
Once the paperwork settled in the Secretary of State's office in Columbus, it turned out that Mr. Santorum would not be on the ballot for district delegates in three districts.
And the only reason he has a chance for delegates in District 7 is that Richard E. Russell and his family decided to take a chance.
Mr. Russell, 55, is business manager for the Norwalk Reflector, a newspaper in the north-central part of the state. Like many Ohioans, he grew up in a Democratic household, but he shifted his allegiance to the GOP as part of the Reagan Revolution in the 1980s.
He has always been interested in politics and has served on the school board and as Richland County fiscal officer. After he and his wife, Amy, moved to their log home in rural Bellevue four years ago, he joined the Huron County Republican Executive Committee.
One evening in December, he was on his computer, reading about the Republicans running for president. At one point, he had been drawn to Georgia businessman Herman Cain, but Mr. Cain had dropped out of the race, and Mr. Russell was searching for "the next-best conservative."
"I was on Facebook, and I 'liked' the Santorum for Ohio page," he said. "The next thing I knew, I got a message asking 'How would you like to be a delegate?' At first I thought it was a scam because you can't be too careful on the Internet."
The message came from Ethan Reynolds, a 20-year-old city councilman in New Carlisle, Ohio, more than a hundred miles away. Mr. Reynolds, a self-described social conservative and political junkie, was using Facebook in a desperate effort to line up people to submit the forms to get his candidate -- Mr. Santorum -- on the ballot in all 16 Ohio districts.
"I feel it's my duty to get involved and work for my candidate," Mr. Reynolds said. "People told me to back one of the other candidates because they said Santorum was going nowhere and would have to drop out. But all those other candidates are the ones who have dropped out and look where Rick Santorum is."
At the end of December, however, rustling up enthusiasm for his candidate wasn't easy. Mr. Reynolds said he got the commitments he could and drove to the state capital, delivering the forms to the Secretary of State's office on the 15th floor of the Continental Plaza Building 30 minutes before the 4 p.m. deadline.
"I called in favors in all parts of the state," Mr. Reynolds said, "but nobody was sending me anything back until after Christmas. It was a big frustration. A few folks didn't want to pull the trigger and send the paperwork to me."
Every state has its own convoluted election rules and Ohio's rank right up there. Once among the most crucial states -- no Republican has ever won the White House without Ohio -- population shifts have shrunk its number of electoral votes from a peak of 26 in 1968 to 18 this year.
The 2010 census also cost Ohio a seat in Congress, forcing a complicated redistricting that took effect last month.
Each Republican voter in the newly shaped 16 districts will have the chance to vote twice Tuesday.
The first vote goes toward the 15 at-large delegates, and all the candidates are eligible. Presuming that no one gets more than 50 percent of the state vote, the delegates will be divided proportionally among the candidates who surpass 20 percent.
The second vote will determine the three delegates from each district. But a candidate can't win these delegates if no one stepped forward and filed the form on his behalf.
In even-numbered districts, the delegates had to be two women and one man. In odd-numbered districts, it's two men, one woman.
"We have some awesome ballot rules in Ohio," Mr. Reynolds said sarcastically. "They hurt minor candidates and third parties. It's ridiculous what we do."
But Matt McClellan, spokesman for the Secretary of State's office, said people shouldn't blame the state.
"Our role is simply to determine if the candidate has met the requirements to appear on the ballot and to count the votes," he said. "When it comes down to delegate distribution, it is all based on party rules."
Mr. Reynolds' December request for help conveyed the urgency of the matter. Even though Mr. Russell was on the county's Republican Executive Committee, he said, "I didn't know any Santorum supporters offhand. I'm sure I could find some if I went looking, but he needed the forms as soon as possible."
Because he lived in an odd-numbered district, Mr. Russell needed two men and a woman. So he enlisted his wife and their 20-year-old son, Ben, who was home from Rochester Institute of Technology in New York for the Christmas break and is still registered to vote in Ohio. The family of three became the three Santorum delegates.
"I did it for expediency more than anything, so I could get them in the mail the next day," Mr. Russell said. "My wife was like, 'What are you getting us into?' But I think it would be fascinating to be a delegate."
There are 157,886 registered voters in District 7, which winds around the north-central part of the state, and all of them have the chance to elect Santorum delegates because of Mr. Reynolds and a three-member family living on State Route 269 in Bellevue. (In Ohio, Democrats and independent voters are permitted to request Republican ballots.)
The voters in Districts 6, 9 and 13 don't have that option. There is no provision for write-in candidates. Yet Mr. Reynolds feels Mr. Santorum will still carry the day.
District 6 is in the southeast corner of the state, running all along the Ohio River and the West Virginia border. "That is prime Santorum country," Mr. Reynolds said, "but unfortunately we're not on the ballot, so it will probably go for Newt [Gingrich, former House speaker]. We don't see it as a major loss, but it's definitely a setback. We'll make up for it in other areas."
District 9 stretches along Lake Erie from Toledo to Cleveland. "Really, we don't lose that much there," Mr. Reynolds said. "That's more like [former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt] Romney territory. They tend to vote more liberal, more elite."
District 13 reaches horizontally from the Pennsylvania state line through Youngstown to Akron. This loss could sting because it is made up of a lot of blue-collar, union-friendly voters whom Mr. Santorum is targeting.
The Romney campaign held a gloating conference call over Mr. Santorum's delegate lapse Saturday afternoon. The taunting tone started with its hyperbolic call-in code: "Rick Santorum delegate debacle."
Ben Ginsburg, a lawyer for the campaign, called the Santorum delegate slating in Ohio and other states "a true test, especially for primary voters, of whether a candidate's ready for prime time," and said the Santorum campaign would be at a huge disadvantage compared to the veteran Obama campaign.
The Santorum campaign did not immediately respond to a request for comment, but Politico reported that Mr. Santorum said, "You know we weren't in a position where Governor Romney is as a front-runner and with a lot of resources, but I'm actually very, very proud of the work that we've done and I think we're gonna come out of these states ... in good shape."
Mr. Russell said he doesn't know what to expect Tuesday or how the results might put him and his wife and son on the convention floor this summer. Driving through the flat farmland, where the silos now share the horizon with cell phone towers, he said he doesn't see a lot of enthusiasm for the race.
"I haven't seen any yard signs," he said. "And hardly anybody's talking about it. I'd like to put out a yard sign, but I don't know where to get one."
First Published March 4, 2012 12:00 am
