Santorum defies mounting pressure to bow out "I think I've answered the question I'm going to answer," he says. He hears all the voices from the Republican establishment, like that of Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) on Sunday morning. No, they're not explicitly telling Santorum to get out. But the message is unmistakable: The nomination battle has gone on long enough. It's now time to let Mitt Romney, the presumptive nominee, and the rest of the party concentrate on the general election campaign against President Obama. Santorum is trying not to listen. He thinks back instead to those days not so many months ago when his campaign was nothing more than himself, "my son John, a guy named Chuck (Laudner) and a Dodge Ram pickup truck" roaming through Iowa, talking to anyone who would listen. He counts 385 campaign events in Iowa over the past year or so, with audiences ranging from a few hundred to a few. The so-called experts wrote him off, gave him no chance, paid no attention to him. Now he is in the finals. "Think about it," he said to an audience of Republicans at a luncheon in Fond du Lac on Sunday afternoon. How does someone like me get here? How does this happen? This is the age of politics of billionaires, big money, endorsements. How does someone who had no money, lost his last race, driving around with a truck in Iowa - how does it possibly happen that you end up winning 11 states against somebody who's outspending you 10 to 1? He hears all the talk about Romney's inevitability, but he looks at the calendar and says he's had a pretty good few weeks, winning primaries in Mississippi, Alabama and Louisiana while Romney was winning Illinois and Puerto Rico. But reality is beginning to settle in around him. He is likely to lose three contests on Tuesday. In Maryland and the District, he could lose by crushing margins. In Wisconsin, the real battleground, he clings to the hope of "doing well" but even he has expressed doubts publicly that he can win. After Tuesday, there is a three-week gap before the next round of contests. Virtually all look bad for Santorum, the only exception being his home state of Pennsylvania, which after this week's results will become a must-win contest for him. On Sunday, he virtually guaranteed that he would win Pennsylvania and, inexplicably, harshly attacked a poll - and the pollster in charge of it - that showed the race there a toss up. The gulf between Santorum and the party establishment seems to be growing. They see him as ignoring the obvious. They worry that a sustained campaign by Santorum, particularly one in which he continues to attack Romney as a nominee who can't draw clear contrasts with Obama, as he has been doing all across Wisconsin, will hurt their chances of winning in November.