A prominent Republican senator tells Jon Karl that if Mitt Romney can’t win in Michigan, “the Republican Party needs to go back to the drawing board and convince somebody new to get into the race.”

“The senator believes Romney will ultimately win in Michigan but says he will publicly call for the party to find a new candidate if he does not.”

Mike Allen: “A tippy-top Republican, unprompted, yesterday sketched the germ of a plan for a new candidate if Rick Santorum upsets Mitt Romney in the Michigan primary on Feb. 28… Our friend handed us a printout of FEC deadlines for ballot access, with five of them circled and starred: California (March 23), Montana (March 12), New Jersey (April 2), New Mexico (March 16) and South Dakota (March 27). The point: Even after Feb. 28, it might be possible to assemble a Hail Mary candidacy that could garner enough delegates to force a CONTESTED convention (a different nuance than BROKERED, which implies that someone is in charge).”

A new Inside Michigan Politics poll shows Mitt Romney and Rick Santorum deadlocked in the Michigan GOP presidential primary with 33% each, followed by Ron Paul at 7% and Newt Gingrich at 5%.

After one night in the field, a new Public Policy Polling survey shows Santorum with a smaller lead than the 15 point lead he held last week.

This is part of our guest series from Inkwell Strategies analyzing the 2012 campaign ad war.

Rick Santorum’s new ad is a breath of fresh air in an already drawn out primary season.

In
a nominating contest filled to the brim with negative advertising,
Santorum’s “Rombo” ad is an unexpected sojourn into the comedic. The
video features a Romney look-alike firing mud from a machine gun at a
cardboard cut-out of a smiling Santorum in a welcome respite from the
usual political season fair.

[Read more…]

Jonathan Bernstein: “In most GOP caucus states, the voting is not strictly connected to delegate selection. If Santorum’s voters don’t understand the procedures, it’s very possible he could win the vote and yet pick up only a handful of delegates. Indeed, that may have already happened in caucus states he’s won, like Iowa, Colorado, and Minnesota…. It’s not impossible — though it’s very unlikely — that the popularity contest could leave Santorum as the clear, unambiguous winner, while Romney becomes the clear, unambiguous nominee. Imagine Santorum finishing with a five point edge or more in votes — even as Romney gets crowned the GOP candidate for president.”

“This is just crap.”

— Rick Santorum, in an interview with National Review, on the media firestorm over comments on contraception made by Santorum Super PAC donor Foster Freiss.

Maine Republican Party chairman Charlie Webster “has admitted that the state party made numerous clerical errors in counting the state’s caucus results — even omitting some votes because emails reporting tallies ‘went to spam’ in an email account,” Politico reports.

Webster insisted that the errors did not change the outcome, but the Portland Press Herald reports “he won’t release the new totals until he talks to both the Romney and Paul campaigns.”

Rick Hasen: “Amateur hour is over. The choice of a president is simply too important to put in the hands of party bumblers and the small percentage of people who are willing to spend hours to cast a vote.”

President Obama “raised more than $29 million for his campaign and for the Democratic Party in January, a strong fundraising month that put him ahead of the pace he set in the last quarter of 2011,” the AP reports.

“The month’s haul raises Obama’s total combined fundraising for this election cycle to about $250 million. In the last three months of 2011, he averaged about $23 million a month.”

Billionaire Sheldon Adelson is expected to donate an additional $10 million to the super PAC supporting Newt Gingrich, a source with knowledge of the donation told CNN.

“That contribution is expected soon, before the end of the month, the source said. The timing is important because Gingirch, whose campaign has been lagging, is hoping to do well in several of the upcoming Super Tuesday states that vote on March 6 to boost his effort. His allies will need that money to be in a position to help. Because ten states go to the polls on that one day, money is key in order to do well.”

Interestingly, Adelson denied to Politico last year that he was looking to give a total of $20 million but that’s what his total will be with this latest contribution.

John Avlon: “Play around with the CNN delegate calculator and you can see that even if Romney were to win every contest going forward with 100 percent of the delegates (that’s called kickin’ it North Korea-style) he still wouldn’t reach 1,144 until April 3. Under a similar extreme scenario, it would take Rick Santorum until April 23. Here’s the real kicker: If Romney and Santorum were to split the delegates going forward and each were to carry five of the 10 all-or-nothing contests, neither candidate would win enough delegates to clinch the nomination.”

“Add to that mix the fact that Ron Paul’s got very little reason to not go all the way to Tampa collecting delegates along the way–and Newt Gingrich has sworn less convincingly to do the same — and the math gets even more daunting for Team Mitt.”

Walter Shapiro gives Rick Santorum’s book, It Takes a Family, a very close read and concludes Santorum is a paradox.

“On one level, he is a
thoughtful conservative, wearing his erudition on his sleeve, bragging
in his book about working with Senate Democrats (even Ted Kennedy and
Hillary Clinton) to sponsor legislation that tried to achieve liberal
goals through conservative institutions like the church and traditional
families. But then, a few pages later, Santorum goes all fire and
brimstone as he writes: ‘Conservatives trust families and the ordinary
Americans that are formed by them. Liberals don’t. They border on
disdain for the common man.'”

A new Rasmussen survey in Arizona finds Mitt Romney leading the GOP presidential field with 39%, followed by Rick Santorum at 31%, Newt Gingrich at 15% and Ron Paul at 7%.

A new American Research Group poll in Michigan shows Rick Santorum continues to lead the GOP presidential primary with 37%, followed by Mitt Romney at 32%, Ron Paul at 15% and Newt Gingrich at 10%.

With the race for the Republican presidential nomination
increasingly looking like a horse race between Mitt Romney and Rick
Santorum, the Wall Street Journal reports that President Obama’s
campaign is looking at ways to soften Santorum for the general election
without giving the nomination to Romney.

“Obama
campaign aides are stepping up their examination of Mr. Santorum’s
record to assess his vulnerabilities and consider how their strategy
might change if he becomes the GOP nominee. For example,
the Obama campaign has criticized Mr. Romney for shifting his policy
stances and painted him as out of touch with middle-class Americans.
That line of attack might not prove as effective against Mr. Santorum.”

Understatement alert: “One
approach might be to highlight Mr. Santorum’s socially conservative
views and argue that they are outside of the mainstream. Another might
be to go after his economic positions.”

Sasha Issenberg: “From a technological perspective, the 2012 campaign
will look to many voters much the same as 2008 did. There will not be a
major innovation that seems to herald a new era in electioneering, like
1996’s debut of candidate Web pages or their use in fundraising four
years later; like online organizing for campaign events in 2004 or the
subsequent emergence of social media as a mass-communication tool in
2008. This year’s looming innovations in campaign mechanics will be
imperceptible to the electorate, and the engineers at Obama’s Chicago
headquarters…may be at work at one of the most important. If
successful, Narwhal would fuse the multiple identities of the engaged
citizen–the online activist, the offline voter, the donor, the
volunteer–into a single, unified political profile.”

“More broadly,
Narwhal would bring new efficiency across the campaign’s operations. No
longer will canvassers be dispatched to knock on the doors of people who
have already volunteered to support Obama. And if a donor has given the
maximum $2,500 in permitted contributions, emails will stop hitting him
up for money and start asking him to volunteer instead.”

ABC News
notes that Rick Santorum, a former Republican Senator from
Pennsylvania, has yet to pick up an endorsement from any of his former
colleagues, while Mitt Romney has been endorsed by 14 senators.

“When
asked about Santorum during an unrelated news conference on jobs today,
his former colleagues took pains to avoid comment, awkwardly looking at
each other, with no one volunteering to respond to the question at
first… Sen. John Thune, R-S.D.,  took the chance to speak about his
endorsement of Romney instead.”

However, BuzzFeed suggests one of Santorum’s former colleagues, Mike DeWine of Ohio, may be switching from Romney to him later today.