(Politico) – The group of social conservative leaders meeting in Texas this weekend has thrown their support behind Rick Santorum, giving the GOP hopeful a much-needed boost a week before the pivotal South Carolina primary.
In a conference call this afternoon, Family Research Council chief Tony Perkins said that on the third ballot Santorum won a solid majority of votes from the movement conservatives gathered at a private ranch near Houston.
Of 114 votes cast, Santorum won 85. Newt Gingrich took the remainder.
In a remarkable slap in his home state, Rick Perry didn’t even make it past the first ballot, Perkins said.
Santorum backers were already taking to Twitter in the moments after Perkins announced the decision to tout the news. The former Pennsylvania senator, largely absent from the political conversation since finishing well behind Mitt Romney in New Hampshire and staying out of the Bain debate, is badly in need of a lift. In that sense, the endorsement is well-timed.
“It’s a validator that people who have been out there, in the fields laboring for the conservative cause, see us as someone who can not only stand and fight for the causes, but effectively fight and win.,” Santorum told reporters at his Mt Pleasant, S.C., headquarters.
But he refrained from calling on any of his rivals to drop out and help unite conservatives.
“That’s up to them,” he said. “They’re going to make that decision.”
But the longer all three candidates stay in the race, the more difficult it will be to stop Romney.
Indeed, the decision of such conservative movers as Perkins, Gary Bauer and James Dobson to wait until the week before the South Carolina primary to make a collective endorsement appears more than a little tardy.
The move to coalesce behind one social conservative alternative would have been more valuable a month ago
