Casey Campaign Says Desperate Santorum Behind False Poll Rumor

On Friday, a new Pennsylvania blog claimed to have a source who had a source who said an internal Casey Poll showed the race closing to within the margin of error, with Santorum at 44% and Casey at 47%. The rumor was dutifully crowed o'er by the Santorum-supporting blogs (PoliPundit, SantorumBlog, RedState, Right Side of the Rainbow, DeSales for Rick) and whined o'er by the Casey supporters, with both sides treating it as fact.

Our initial reaction was dubious, for a number of reasons. So, calling on our long-ago, done and buried, journalism career, we simply put it to the Casey camp. An e-mail to Larry Smar, Casey's campaign chief spokesperson [haste makes waste -- just noticed I left out "spokesperson" here -- Jay Reiff is Casey's campaign manager, Larry Smar the press guy -- ABFS], was promptly returned. Smar denied that there was any such internal and put the source of the rumor on a desperate Santorum campaign which has been mired at or below 40% despite an early and expensive ad buy:

You should know that you can't believe everything you read on blogs. There isn't a shred of truth to that post.

Ever[] since Gallup/USA Today published a poll last week showing us again leading by double digits, the Santorum camp has been in spin overdrive. First, Santorum told MSNBC that is was a "bogus poll."

Next, the NRSC reheated a leftover press release rehashing old polls to claim Santorum was surging--ignoring the latest numbers to the contrary. Nobody bought it. Now they are shopping around a right-wing blog post about some bogus internal Casey poll.

It is important to note that the Gallup poll was the first public poll released since we started our ad buy.

So Santorum and his allies have aired $7 million in TV ads. The third-party groups that have been spending millions helping Santorum are now required to be off the air. It looks like Santorum has blown most of his cash-on-hand advantage. And we still have a double-digit lead and Santorum's numbers are still anchored at or below 40%.

No wonder Santorum is calling Gallup polls bogus and making up fake Casey polls.

Smar makes a number of noteworthy points here. As we said a couple of weeks back, Santorum's inability to move out of the upper thirties/low forties in polling negates any Republican claim of a momentum for the flailing incumbent. The fact that, after almost two months of early advertising, Santorum's team has been unable to move his numbers up is rather telling. If Smar is correct about the size of Santorum's ad buys -- $7 million -- then the Senator has indeed blown his cash-on-hand lead. As of June 30, Santorum's reported cash on hand was $9.4 million, against Bob Casey's reported $5.4 million. The loss of the cash advantage, combined with the loss of non-candidate-based advertising 60-days out from the election, could make for some desperate times for Santorum.

The Senator is much further from winning this campaign than the 6 or 8-point gaps in some recent polls suggest. He is a multi-term incumbent, stuck at or below 40, is consistently rated by Pennsylvanians lower than nearly all other US Senators, has terrible unfavorables, and has been joined at the hip to a Bush Adminstration which gets some of its lowest marks from PA voters. If, in addition to all of that, he has blown his huge cash advantage . . . . get the butter, Mabel, the toast is almost ready.