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Rick Santorum Announces Another Run For GOP's Presidential Nominee

DAVID GREENE, HOST:

Rick Santorum popped the cork on another presidential campaign yesterday. Back in 2012, the former senator gave Mitt Romney an unexpected challenge for the GOP nomination. Here's NPR's Don Gonyea.

DON GONYEA, BYLINE: Santorum hopes to improve on his last White House run when he narrowly won the Iowa caucuses and captured 10 other states. He's a social conservative with a message of economic populism. This is from his announcement in southwest Pennsylvania, his home state.

(SOUNDBITE OF SPEECH)

RICK SANTORUM: Working families don't need another president tide to big government or big money. And today is the day. Today is the day we are going to begin to fight back.

(CHEERS, APPLAUSE)

GONYEA: Santorum has already been campaigning for months. In a GOP field of 15 or more, he'll have to work just to hang on to those who backed him in 2012. In Iowa four years ago, he got Sherry Kooiker's vote, but she told NPR at an event for former Texas governor, Rick Perry, that she's considering lots of the options this year.

SHERRY KOOIKER: I listened to Bobby Jindal yesterday. I liked him. And I like Ben Carson. I met him at - in, oh, Des Moines. So that's the problem. It's just very difficult. I want to stay open to the best person.

GONYEA: Polls put Santorum's support in single digits. The top 10 in an average of major national polls will be eligible to join the first debate in August. Don Gonyea, NPR News. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.

NPR transcripts are created on a rush deadline by an NPR contractor. This text may not be in its final form and may be updated or revised in the future. Accuracy and availability may vary. The authoritative record of NPR’s programming is the audio record.

You're most likely to find NPR's Don Gonyea on the road, in some battleground state looking for voters to sit with him at the local lunch spot, the VFW or union hall, at a campaign rally, or at their kitchen tables to tell him what's on their minds. Through countless such conversations over the course of the year, he gets a ground-level view of American elections. Gonyea is NPR's National Political Correspondent, a position he has held since 2010. His reports can be heard on all NPR News programs and at NPR.org. To hear his sound-rich stories is akin to riding in the passenger seat of his rental car, traveling through Iowa or South Carolina or Michigan or wherever, right along with him.