Rick Santorum is now neck-and-neck with Mitt Romney in two national polls, reflecting the former Pennsylvania senator's surge in the past week as well as a slide for Romney among the most conservative voters.
Santorum leads Romney, 30% to 28%, of Republican and GOP-leaning voters in a Pew Research Center poll taken Wednesday through Sunday. A month ago, Romney had a 17-point lead over Santorum in the Pew survey.
In Gallup's daily tracking poll, Romney leads Santorum by two percentage points: 32% to 30% among registered GOP voters. Romney previously had a 19-point lead on Santorum during Gallup interviews taken Jan. 30-Feb. 3.
The Pew poll points out challenges for Romney, the prohibitive GOP front-runner who has had trouble exciting conservative voters.
One telling point from the guts of the Pew poll: In November, before voting actually began in the GOP race, a majority (or 53%) of Republican and Republican-leaning voters said they thought Romney was a "strong conservative."
Today, 42% say they see Romney as a "strong conservative" while a majority (or 50%) say he is not.
The Gallup daily tracking poll is a five-day rolling average, reflecting public opinion Wednesday through Sunday. It includes interviews taken after Romney's speech to the Conservative Political Action Conference on Saturday, in which he defended his record as Massachusetts governor and called himself "severely conservative."
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Poor Mutt. Turns out the Klown Kar is Pinto, not a Rolls.