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THE LID: Rick Santorum Deja Vu (All Over Again)

Image: Crowd gathers for Republican presidential candidate and former U.S. Senator Rick Santorum's formally declaring his candidacy for the 2016 Republican presidential nomination
A crowd gathers for Republican presidential candidate, and former U.S. Senator, Rick Santorum's formally declaring his candidacy for the 2016 Republican presidential nomination during an announcement event in Cabot, Pennsylvania, May 27, 2015. REUTERS/Aaron JosefczykAARON JOSEFCZYK / Reuters

Welcome to the Lid, your afternoon dose of the 2016 ethos...Rick Santorum's daughters told him not to wear a sweater vest during his second presidential run...but they didn't say anything about a fedora...

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’16 AT 30 THOUSAND

The more things change, the more they stay the same. That’s at least the case when it comes to Rick Santorum. Four years ago he announced his presidential run in Somerset, PA, entering the race as an underfunded longshot candidate who surprised many in his party by becoming the runner-up to Mitt Romney. And later today he’ll announce his second presidential run in Cabot, PA (about 1.5 hours north of Somerset), and he’ll enter the race as a slightly better funded but still longshot candidate. To hear the Santorum team tell it, experience running for president matters and that’s the reason the GOP has traditionally selected the runner-up. To watch the polls tell it, the 2012 second place finisher in the GOP nominating contest doesn’t have enough support to participate in the first debate if it were held today.

Santorum now has rivals like Mike Huckabee, Ted Cruz, and Scott Walker ready to eat into his support with evangelical voters in Iowa, the state that propelled his 2012 bid. The architects behind his successful caucus strategy have mostly moved on to other candidates. But there is a reason that Republicans in Iowa who no longer support him aren’t willing to write him off. After all, he’s still the same guy who visited all 99 counties in Iowa before the caucuses. (And he almost did it twice.) He’s already been to 26 counties since the start of this year. As one Iowa Republican told one of us: “He’s the tortoise. There are lots of hares running around.”

POPPING ON NBC POLITICS

  • The GOP has a long history of nominating the candidate who is next in line. But the GOP is just not that into Rick Santorum, NBC’s Perry Bacon writes.
  • Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal took aim at Rand Paul this morning after the Kentucky Republican said: “ISIS exists and grew stronger because of the hawks in our party." In return, the Paul campaign went after Jindal for flip flopping on Common Core, his economic record and for previously supporting Paul’s efforts to reform the NSA, one of us reports.
  • Hillary Clinton visited South Carolina for the first time of her campaign, a state where she suffered a devastating loss to challenger Barack Obama in the 2008 presidential race, NBC’s Leigh Ann Caldwell reports.
  • Republican presidential candidate Rand Paul told an audience on Chicago’s south side that crime and concerns over aggressive police tactics are a “spiritual problem” and “not a racial thing.”
  • And don’t miss this hot take from First Read about the “Romney-ifcation” of Bill and Hillary Clinton.

CAMPAIGN QUICK READS

CLINTON: “A federal judge issued an order Wednesday requiring the State Department to make public batches of former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton's emails every 30 days starting next month,” Politico reports.

SANTORUM: He told ABC News ahead of his announcement: ‘I’m ready to do this again.”

KASICH: Per the Washington Post: Ohio Gov. John Kasich is “moving rapidly to assemble the staff and financial resources” for a presidential run. He is looking to declare after June 30.

FIORINA: She tried to troll Hillary Clinton while the two both happened to be in Columbia, South Carolina on Wednesday.

FOR THE RECORD…

“What’s 'Right to Rise'? Getting up in the morning?”

  • Ohio Gov. John Kasich on the name of Jeb Bush’s political operation

TOMORROW’S SKED

George Pataki makes his 2016 announcement in Exeter, New Hampshire at 11 a.m. ET.

Rick Santorum makes his first official campaign stop in Davenport, Iowa at 4 p.m. ET.

Jeb Bush makes stops in Lansing and Bath Township, Michigan.