Guess Who Came to Dinner?

With little fanfare, former Sen. Rick Santorum of Pennsylvania swept a straw poll of South Carolina Republican leaders and activists on Friday evening, a day after the the first Republican presidential debate of 2012.

“They say half of life is just showing up,” said Santorum, unintentionally parroting comedian Woody Allen in opening his twenty-minute speech Friday night.

It was a smart move on Santorum‘s part, even if few pundits noticed.

Realizing that GOP feathers had been ruffled when most of the party’s top-tier candidates refused to participate in the South Carolina debate — Romney, Trump, Huckabee, Palin and Gingrich were noticeably absent — Santorum saw his opening and shrewdly seized the opportunity, reminding the largely conservative crowd that their state was worth fighting for.

Santorum, of course, wasn‘t reticent about driving the point home. “The voters of South Carolina want a candidate who will work hard for the nomination and who respects the state’s role as the First-in-the-South primary,” he said in a statement issued shortly after Friday’s straw poll. “I look forward to returning to the Palmetto State soon.”

As the only GOP presidential candidate to attend Friday night’s annual Silver Elephant fundraising dinner, the socially-conservative Santorum, who has been campaigning doggedly in South Carolina, captured over 37 percent of the vote in the straw poll, garnering 150 of the 408 votes cast.

Former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney finished a distant second with 61 votes while Herman Cain, largely regarded as the surprise winner of Thursday night’s nationally-televised FOX News debate, received 44 votes. Donald Trump, the publicity-seeking master of bluster, was only favored by 29 of the dinner attendees.

Nobody has worked harder in the Palmetto State — the third major test in the 2012 GOP presidential sweepstakes — than the former two-term Senator who lost his seat to Democrat Bob Casey in 2006.

According to this excellent article by the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette’s Daniel Malloy, Santorum has already visited the state fifteen times since late 2009, when he first began toying with the idea of running for president.

As Malloy pointed out, South Carolina has accurately picked the Republican presidential nominee in every primary dating back to 1980 when Ronald Reagan trounced former Secretary of the Treasury John B. Connally in the state’s March 8 primary, four days after Reagan narrowly lost to George H.W. Bush in Massachusetts and barely beat Illinois Rep. John B. Anderson in Vermont.

Reagan’s overwhelming victory in South Carolina that year ended Connally’s presidential hopes. A former Democrat who gambled nearly $12 million on the Republican nomination — spending much of it in the Palmetto State — the white-haired Texan called it quits a day after his shellacking by Reagan.

If Santorum manages to survive the Iowa caucus and New Hampshire’s first-in-the-nation primary, the South Carolina primary — coming only days after voters in the Granite State render their verdict — could turn out to be quite interesting, especially if former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee decides not to give it another whirl.