Santorum’s hat-trick ­rattles White House race

Christian conservative Rick Santorum, who revived his campaign with a surprise sweep on Tuesday, has shaken up the White House race with a faith-based brand of Republican populism.

I don’t stand here to claim to be the conservative alternative to Mitt Romney. I stand here to be the conservative alternative to Barack Obama

After fading in a string of votes following his opening win in Iowa, Mr Santorum surged back to strip front runner Mitt Romney of Minnesota, Missouri and, most importantly Colorado, a state the former Massachusetts governor had been expected to win handsomely.

His consistent message of “Family, Faith and Freedom” has found a ready audience across the American heartland, where evangelicals make up a key voting bloc for the candidates hoping to take on President Barack Obama in November.

“Tonight was a victory for the voices of our party, conservatives and Tea Party people, who are out there every single day in the vineyards building the conservative movement in this country,” Mr Santorum said in his victory address.

The devout Catholic has set himself apart from rivals by his hardline stance on social issues and a populist rebranding of free-market policies he has called “supply-side economics for the working man”.

“I do care about not 99 per cent or 95 per cent. I care about the very rich and the very poor. I care about 100 per cent of America,” he said, implicitly mocking an earlier gaffe by the multi-millionaire former businessman Mr Romney.

In an intensely personal speech following his early win in Iowa, Mr Santorum had described his roots in Pennsylvania’s coal country, where his grandfather fled in 1925 and worked in the mines until he died at 72.

“I knelt next to his coffin. And all I could do – eye level – was look at his hands. They were enormous hands. And all I could think was those hands dug freedom for me.”

Mr Santorum has spoken of his seriously ill youngest daughter, Isabella Maria, who suffers from a disability due to a genetic disorder, and has defied the odds to survive to the age of three.

He has also tearfully recounted a family tragedy in 1996 when a son died hours after being born prematurely. He and his wife spent the night with the body and brought it home to show to their other children before burying it.

“Ask me what motivates me, it’s been the dignity of every human life,” Mr Santorum said in his Iowa speech.

Despite his latest wins, doubts remain whether Mr Santorum has the organisational ability and political chops to defeat Mr Romney in the long state-by-state nominating process to secure the Republican Party crown.

The youthful 53-year-old, a father of seven who has been married to his wife Karen for 21 years, had struggled early in his quest to be the Republican Party challenger to take on President Barack Obama, a Democrat, in November.

Lacking national name recognition – despite being first elected to the House of Representatives for Pennsylvania in 1990 and then serving two terms in the US Senate from 1995 to 2007 – Mr Santorum has been something of a dark horse.

Liberal opponents have derided him as an ultra-religious, anti-gay creationist who has equated homosexuality with incest and paedophilia, but Mr Santorum plays his social and fiscal conservatism as trump cards.

His staunch pro-life position and opposition to gay marriage have won admirers among conservative Americans, mistrustful of Mr Romney’s perceived “flip-flopping” on such issues and suspicious of his Mormon faith.