Several top staffers have left Rick Santorum’s campaign to create a new super PAC, a move spurred by the cash-strapped candidate’s anemic fundraising.

Campaign manager Terry Allen, Iowa state coordinator Jon Jones and digital strategist Steve Hilliard — Allen’s son-in-law — departed several weeks ago, leaving the winner of the 2012 Iowa caucuses without a campaign manager and raising questions about whether Santorum can last until Iowa votes on Feb. 1 next year.


The reshuffling comes on the heels of another key departure — Karen Fesler, a prominent Iowa activist who had been aiding Santorum’s efforts in the state. She now serves as Rick Perry’s Iowa co-chair, the latest of a number of prominent Santorum activists who helped propel him to GOP runner-up status in 2012 but aligned with different candidates in 2016.

The former Pennsylvania senator had among the worst fundraising hauls of the entire presidential field, raising only about $600,000 and spending about 60 percent of that in his first fundraising quarter as a presidential candidate.

Allen, Jones and Hilliard are expected to file the paperwork for a new pro-Santorum super PAC — separate from the already existing super PAC, Working Again, launched by Santorum’s 2012 finance director — as early as this week, Allen said in a recent interview.

Allen, who left the campaign on July 18, said he could best help the campaign from the super PAC side, where the outfit can receive unlimited contributions. He declined to answer whether he had yet lined up donors.

Asked whether the official campaign’s money struggles had shaped his decision to leave, Allen didn’t dispute that cash was tight but said it made more strategic sense to operate out of a super PAC, which will be focused on funding Santorum’s ground game.

“Every campaign, I don’t care who it is, is the ultimate underfunded start-up,” he said. “No matter if you have all the money, you never have enough money. There’s no campaign that ever has enough money, that’s just the nature of campaigns. But my decision to leave was because this is the most efficient and effective way to help the senator, and it became very obvious, and you see more campaigns figuring it out.”

There are no immediate plans to replace Allen, said Matt Beynon, Santorum’s spokesman. But he dismissed the idea that the spate of recent departures signaled internal distress, saying that John Brabender, Santorum’s longtime chief strategist, was always running the show anyway, and adding that the team will be adding three new field staffers in Iowa in coming weeks, bringing its paid staff total to 25.

“Terry was, certainly he was the campaign manager, but John Brabender is Rick Santorum’s Axelrod, his Karl Rove,” Beynon said, quickly adding that “Terry did a great job.”

Brabender, who is expected to step into a more hands-on role for the moment, said Allen didn’t play the kind of big-picture strategic role that campaign managers historically have done and was instead involved in a more organizational capacity — a job he will now be able to do on the super PAC side with more funds, he said.

“It had to do with what every campaign has to do these days, figure out where their dollars are going to come from,” Brabender said. “It is not unusual for people to go from a campaign to a super PAC.”

But it is atypical to have the campaign manager, and one of a state’s top political points of contact — the role Jones played in Iowa — depart so soon after getting the official operation off the ground. Allen announced his departure three days after the abysmal first round of fundraising numbers came in.

The Santorum camp insists that a lean, no-frills operation is best-suited to execute the kind of campaign Santorum envisions. He aims to project a blue-collar, everyman ethos and employ the traditional long-shot’s playbook — a retail-heavy campaign built on one-on-one interactions all over Iowa.

But that feat was easier accomplished in 2012, when Santorum was running in a much smaller field than the one in place for 2016 and one with fewer candidates vying for the socially conservative vote. In Iowa, the state around which Santorum is basing his entire campaign, he polls in the middle of the pack, while nationally he’s toward the bottom.

Some of his former staffers and supporters felt Santorum didn’t do enough work in the intervening years to maintain the infrastructure he had in Iowa at the end of the last presidential cycle, leading several to sign up with other campaigns this year.

“A lot of what happened in 2012 was a function of Rick Santorum being the last man standing, and in order to translate that to 2016, you’ve got to continue to show attention and love to the grass roots,” said a veteran of Santorum’s 2012 race, who is unaligned with any campaign this year. “It’s a matter of picking up the phone and calling everyone who served as a county chair, and that takes a lot of resources and takes a lot of time. … I don’t think it happened enough.”

Earlier this summer, Santorum held an event at which only one person initially showed up, a debacle that generated national headlines and created a perception among some Iowa political hands that things were unraveling (his campaign notes that other events have drawn hundreds of attendees).

“Their schedule doesn’t make sense, there’s no real strategy to it, they’ve gone to towns in Iowa that are practically unincorporated,” said a source familiar with the campaign. “He had … events where one person showed up, which is bad staff work.”

Last month, Cody Brown, who was Santorum’s 2012 caucus director and is respected as an organizer, came back on board as a senior adviser in Iowa. He is helping to rebuild, and build out, the field team.

“It’s critical that we continue to develop the values of grit and tenacity throughout our organization, starting with our recruitment process, so these values drive behaviors and create the type of culture we need to succeed,” he said. “We’re never going to be the flashy, big-dollar campaign — it’s not who Rick is, and it’s not who we are.”

Last cycle, Santorum raised $2.2 million ahead of the Iowa caucuses, and Beynon said he would raise more than that this cycle. The difference this time around, though, is that figure is barely a drop in the bucket compared with the fundraising clip of most other rivals. Beynon said they would raise enough to be competitive; the campaign recently rolled out a campaign finance team featuring several deep-pocketed donors, including Foster Friess, who helped bankroll Santorum’s last campaign.

“The [campaign] we’re running this cycle doesn’t have fancy data and tech tools; we don’t have the fundraising figures some other campaigns have,” Brown said. “Just like we did last time, [the campaign] reflects Rick’s personality. We are a gritty campaign. He’s a shoe-leather type of guy.”