May 27, 2015 11:54 AM UTC

Rick Santorum, 2012 Colorado Caucus Winner, Running Again

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• by: Colorado Pols

ABC News reporting:

Rick Santorum, the former Republican senator from Pennsylvania, will announce today that he will seek the GOP nomination for president in 2016, ABC News has learned. ABC News’ Chief Anchor George Stephanopoulos will sit down for an exclusive interview with Santorum this afternoon.

Santorum, 57, is set to reveal his presidential intentions at an event today in Cabot, Pa., near his childhood home. It will be his second run for the White House, almost four years after he won primaries and caucuses in 11 states and finished second to former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney in the race for the Republican nomination.

Santorum will join a quickly widening Republican field that already includes six declared candidates and could grow to encompass around a dozen more. Several contenders are expected to give him tougher competition this time around for the Christian conservative votes he relied on in 2012.

Our longtime readers know that Colorado was one of the states carried by former Sen. Rick Santorum during the 2012 GOP presidential primaries, briefly throwing the race into chaos, and unhelpfully delaying the eventual coronation of Mitt Romney–helping feed an already well-entrenched narrative about Romney not being the party rank-and-file’s first choice.

Our recollection of 2012 is that Santorum worked very hard courting conservative Republican caucusgoers, and whatever you might think of Santorum’s wedge-issue agenda, he’s quite skilled at the sort of retail small-audience politicking that wins caucuses. There’s an argument that Santorum’s victory in Colorado in 2012 helped motivate a failed compromise effort this year to restore our state’s presidential primary elections–an effort that was scotched under less-than-transparent circumstances by infighting within the Colorado Republican Party. As a result, the process stays the same for next year.

Which we expect suits Rick Santorum just fine.