Rasmussen, Gallup Show Big Santorum Surge

Rick Santorum has vaulted into second place among the Republican presidential candidates, polling well into the double digits in the last month, according to two new national surveys from the leading poll outlets Rasmussen and Gallup.

Rasmussen has Santorum in second with 21 percent of likely Republican primary voters in its latest poll, just behind Mitt Romney at 29 percent.
The poll was conducted Wednesday night, a day after Santorum’s surprising second-place finish at the Iowa caucuses, in which the former Pennsylvania senator fell short of Romney by only eight votes.

The Gallup poll has Santorum’s share of the vote increasing to 11 percent, from 8 percent, in its daily tracking poll. Gallup uses a five-day rolling sample, meaning that only 20 percent of its interviews were conducted after Santorum’s showing in Iowa. That implies that Santorum polled at or just above 20 percent in interviews conducted on Wednesday alone, consistent with his standing in the Rasmussen Reports survey, The New York Times pointed out.

In the Rasmussen poll the two frontrunners were followed by Newt Gingrich at 16 percent, Ron Paul at 12 percent and Rick Perry and Jon Huntsman at 4 percent each. Santorum began November at 1 percent in the same survey, and finished the month at only 4 percent.