Still winless, Ron Paul campaign presses on

(Charlie Litchfield/Idaho Press-Tribune/AP Photo)

FARGO, N.D. - Presidential hopeful Ron Paul's hopes for his first win of the presidential season were dashed again tonight when North Dakota handed the libertarian leaning Texas congressman another loss.

The campaign was very optimistic about a win here, even abandoning the Super Tuesday caucus state of Idaho to campaign here Tuesday night.

He told a group of several hundred supporters earlier tonight at a caucus site in Fargo that he was going to win.

"This country is ready and raring," Paul said to thunderous applause.

Paul is sticking with his strategy of focusing on small caucus states and placed big bets on three Super Tuesday states: Alaska, Idaho, and North Dakota.

Those three states have a total of 87 delegates at stake. Paul told CBS News' Bob Schieffer on Sunday that there is a "good chance we come out with a majority of delegates."

The Texas congressman visited Alaska over the weekend.

Paul is the only candidate who made a trip up there, while others sent delegates or held teleconferences.

According to the Washington Post, it's a toss up there. Sarah Palin has ambiguously endorsed Newt Gingrich there, but it remains to be seen how far it helps him.

Paul then went to Idaho, which offers 32 delegates. And although Romney, Santorum and Gingrich have campaigned in the state, only Ron Paul actually has a campaign office there.

Paul won second place in the 2008 Idaho GOP primary and he won a Jan. 6 straw poll of 399 Republicans, the Idaho Statesman reported.

Today was Paul's third visit to North Dakota in the primary season, following a February tour of the state and an event in Fargo last November.

Mitt Romney and Rick Santorum have also visited North Dakota, while former Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich has not.

Four years ago on Super Tuesday 2008, Romney easily won North Dakota's GOP caucuses, getting 36 percent of the vote in a five-candidate field. Although Paul was third, with 21 percent, he fared better in North Dakota than he did in almost all of the 20 other states that held Republican primaries or caucuses.

Matt Becker, a spokesman for the North Dakota GOP reportedly said that the demographics of North Dakota play to Paul's strengths and Paul's North Dakota operation has been the most extensive of any of the four GOP candidates.

Paul's state headquarters, tucked into a small Bismarck office across the street from the city's federal courthouse, has been running for almost four months.

More than $50,000 of the $152,000 in North Dakota contributions reported so far have gone to Paul's campaign, according to Federal Election Commission disclosure reports.

Although Paul admitted that his chances "are slim" of winning the GOP nomination, he shows no sign of slowing down.

In a statement released to this column Monday, Paul explains: "While other candidates are focused solely on the beauty contests to get the headlines, we're undertaking a comprehensive strategy that I am confident can lead to the nomination."

Paul is already planning campaign events in Kansas on Friday and Missouri on Saturday.

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Rick Santorum: We have a 'guerrilla campaign'

ATLANTA - Rick Santorum defined his campaign, which he says has none of the frills or trappings of Mitt Romney's, as a "guerrilla campaign" Thursday. He raised $9  million in February alone, but the candidate believes as the race approaches Super Tuesday, he will be outspent by his rival.

"Look, I don't have billionaires giving me tens of billions of dollars to super PACS," Santorum said. "We raised $9 million in the last month. We're converting a lot of that into television ads, but also a lot of other things that we're doing. … We're not going to be able to go out and use a sledge hammer on television, but we're connecting with voters, social media, all sorts of volunteer calls and activities that we've got going on in every state."

Santorum says he has "a great organization" in Georgia, the state with the biggest delegate haul when 10 states vote this coming Tuesday. He also, like the three others in this race, has a superPAC, but it hasn't invested in Georgia yet. Romney's superPAC has spent more than $1 million here up to now, but their ads are just attacking Newt Gingrich.

Santorum told reporters after a rally at an airplane hangar here that his website had 130,000 donors last month and two thirds were low-dollar donors. He added that he thought the Romney campaign and his superPAC's negative ads in Michigan actually helped him in the state.  "When he started to run those ads, we won voters," said Santorum.

"Governor Romney's M.O. of going out and trying to beat up another opponent is wearing thin among Republican voters," he said.

"Compared to Governor Romney, nine percent of his donations were small dollar donations," Santorum said. "We have the base of the Republican Party, we have the activists who are excited about our campaign who are contributing. There's only so many times, there's only so many people you can go for maxed-out contributions, but you can go back to that $50 donor again and again throughout the course of this campaign. And 130,000 people at a time, you can run a campaign based on that."

He said he's done fewer than 30 fundraisers while campaigning, a stunningly low number. The campaign relies on frugality and a stripped-down campaign to make the money last longer; there's no national headquarters, and a small paid staff.

"We're just not going around meeting with CEOs and in the big cities," Santorum said. "This campaign is living off the hard work of average ordinary people across this country who want to see a fundamental change, not on folks who have a - well, let's say a special interest in electing their candidate…. The folks who are giving $50 are the folks who want to see a free and prosperous America, and someone who is going to stand up for the values that made it that way."

It's not often you see a candidate that vocally rejects a high-dollar donation, but in doing so Santorum is aiming to try to appeal more to those donors he mentioned: the ones that can keep giving, nowhere near the legal limit.

One moment that personified the stripped-down campaign came when the candidate, his daughter Elizabeth, two aides and their Secret Service detail stopped by a Chick-Fil-A on Thursday for lunch before traveling across the country to campaign in Washington state ahead of Saturday's caucuses.

He ordered a spicy chicken sandwich, while using a coupon, and had a quick conversation with the manager.

"Did you hear about one of the guys working for us? Did you hear about that," Santorum asked the manager. She said she had not.

"Mitt Romney has this high-paid staff and all other people he got from all these law firms and everything, and our assistant marketing director we just hired out of a Chick-Fil-A," Santorum said. "We're a little bit of a different type of a campaign."

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Santorum campaign hoping for help from Gingrich

NASHVILLE (AP) — Short on money and staff, Rick Santorum needs help to remain a viable threat to front-runner Mitt Romney in the race for the Republican presidential nomination. One strategist hopes it will come from another rival, Newt Gingrich.

Top adviser John Brabender says Santorum's future may depend upon Gingrich leaving the race. The former House speaker is showing no signs of bowing out, certainly not before next week's Super Tuesday voting.

"If we could ever make this where we have all the conservatives and tea party supporters behind us as one candidate against Mitt Romney, we'll win the nomination," Brabender said Wednesday as the Santorum campaign recalibrated after finishing a disappointing second in Michigan's primary.

Santorum and Gingrich are appealing for support from the same bloc of conservative voters. In Michigan, where Gingrich didn't actively compete, the former speaker earned more than 6 percent of the vote. Romney beat Santorum by roughly 3 percentage points.

As Super Tuesday nears, Gingrich's campaign is focusing on Georgia, the state he represented in Congress for 20 years, and a handful of other delegate-rich states. A Gingrich spokesman confirmed Wednesday that there's been no pressure from Santorum's camp to leave the race.

Santorum went out of his way to compliment the former House speaker Wednesday at a rally in Knoxville, Tenn., as he recalled the impact of President Ronald Reagan and others early in his political career.

"I even give credit to Speaker Gingrich when I was thinking of running for the House of Representatives, as a great educator as he is," Santorum said. "It was important for me to understand who we are. Reagan did a lot of that education, and give Newt credit for doing a lot more."

Asked if Santorum needs Gingrich to drop out, Brabender replied, "We either need that or we need Gingrich's supporters" to shift in Santorum's direction.

Even if they did, the Santorum campaign remains underfunded and understaffed. Volunteers play key roles for the campaign in states where Romney has had professional operations for weeks.

Santorum is running a "MacGyver campaign," Brabender said, a reference to the scrappy television hero who seemingly conquered every situation with a Swiss Army knife and duct tape. But success on Super Tuesday — it features elections in 10 states — may require more than MacGyver's bag of tricks.

In addition to Washington state, which holds GOP caucuses Saturday, Santorum will aggressively target at least four Super Tuesday states: Oklahoma, Ohio, Tennessee and Georgia, campaign manager Mike Biundo said. The campaign doesn't yet have paid staff in each of those states. For example, a group of roughly 30 volunteers staff an office in Georgia.

"The true believers are out there killing themselves for us," Biundo said.

Romney won't make things easy on Santorum's ragtag team. A group allied with Romney spent more than $2 million Wednesday alone on anti-Santorum television commercials that will run in each of Santorum's target states, among others. The ads already running in Tennessee blast Santorum's spending record in Congress, charging that Washington corrupted his values.

Santorum's media presence is far smaller. A spokeswoman couldn't immediately say where he's running ads.

Santorum is depending on reaching voters the old-fashioned way. He's hosting multiple public events that will take him to Tennessee, Georgia, Washington state and Ohio.

"We're heading into Super Tuesday with a lot of wind at our back," Santorum declared at a Nashville rally Wednesday night.

Momentum wasn't enough in Michigan, where Santorum struggled to defend statements about the separation of church and state and about education — he called President Barack Obama a "snob" for wanting all Americans to attend college. His polling numbers fell in the days before the primary.

Santorum may be planning to tweak his message to focus more on his personal story, but his advisers suggest he will not hide from charged social issues. Still, potential supporters can expect to hear a broad message from Santorum in the coming days.

Brabender said the themes will include energy policy, small-town America, family values and a greater emphasis on his personal story, particularly the influence of his 93-year-old mother.

"He is always going to have to struggle by responding to misperceptions that are out there," Brabender said. "The way that you solve that sometimes is to let people into your life and see a picture of you that you don't always share."

He'll get some help from state and local Republican parties, which have helped plan events for the understaffed Santorum in recent weeks. And groups like the Susan B. Anthony List, a pro-life advocate, pitched in as well this week, devoting $200,000 to a pro-Santorum Ohio radio campaign.

Before he left Tennessee Wednesday night, Santorum asked the crowd for more help.

"Don't just go and vote. That's not doing your duty," he said. "Be a part of something big."

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Santorum touts energy industry, free market at campaign stop in Detroit

Santorum (Paul Sancya/AP)

DETROIT, Mich-- The manufacturing and energy industries--if freed from the shackles of the Obama administration--hold the keys to economic recovery, Rick Santorum told guests gathered here today at the Detroit Economic Club.

Brandishing a hunk of coal (which he said he received during a campaign stop yesterday in North Dakota), Santorum touted the energy industry as a path forward for the U.S. economy in addition to manufacturing-- an issue of great importance to this area, which was hard hit by the collapse of the auto industry.

"The average job in western North Dakota: $90,000 dollars a year," the former Pennsylvania senator said. "Goes a long way in Tioga, North Dakota. There's the opportunity for you, folks. That's what energy and manufacturing can do."

Santorum attacked President Obama for rejecting the Keystone XL Pipeline and failing to support other U.S. energy sources, and for allowing union ties and bailouts to stifle the country's manufacturing industry.

"This is a president who is suffocating this economy. This is a president who doesn't care about you and the cost of living you have to deal with," Santorum said.

Santorum, who was not in office in 2008 when Congress voted for the TARP auto bailouts, took a hard stance against bailouts during the question-and-answer session following his speech. Contrasting himself with opponent Mitt Romney, Santorum said that while Romney, a former Massachusetts governor who earned significant wealth from a private equity firm, supported the Wall Street bailout but rejected the auto bailout, Santorum has been consistent in his opposition.

"If we had just stayed out of it completely and let the market work, I believe the market would have worked," Santorum said. "Would the auto industry look different than it does today? Yes, it would be. Would it still be alive and well? I think it would be alive and equally as well if not better."

In explaining his opposition to the auto bailout, Santorum, grandson of a coal miner, cited his experiences in Pennsylvania dealing with a struggling steel industry, which he concedes today is smaller and experiences inconsistent profits, but is alive and competitive.

Santorum used Thursday's appearance ahead of Michigan's Feb. 28th primary to contrast himself with Romney, who was born in Michigan where his father served as governor, and to argue against some of the attacks he's recently faced.

"I know you folks here in Michigan have been hearing some things on the television from one of my opponents that I am a big spender," Santorum said, referencing a recent ad from Romney's super PAC. But Santorum said any objective look at his records says otherwise, noting a Weekly Standard article published Wednesday that reported the National Taxpayers' Union gave Santorum high-- sometimes even the highest-- marks on spending during his tenure in the Senate.

Santorum also alluded to a statement that continues to haunt Romney-- Romney's comments about being unconcerned about the "very poor," because there are safety nets in place for many of these individuals. "I'm a candidate who cares about 100 percent," Santorum said.

Santorum criticized President Obama for creating class warfare, creating a system where Americans are reliant on government support, and where union bosses rule the public sector. Santorum, who mentioned his grandfather was his union's treasurer, said he does see a place for private sector unions. It's public sector unions that he's "not quite as warm and fuzzy about," Santorum said.

In between arguing that the president's first priority is the government, and Romney's is Wall Street, Santorum spent much of his speech arguing that he's for all Americans. I want to create "an atmosphere for everyone to rise in America," Santorum told the audience.

Recent polls show Santorum cutting into and even overtaking Romney's lead in Michigan as the state's "native son." Santorum is scheduled to hold two more public events in Michigan-- one Thursday night and another Friday morning-- before heading to Ohio, one of the states where voters head to the polls on Super Tuesday Mar. 6.

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