Republican Hopefuls Face Off In The Deep South

WASHINGTON (AP) — Rick Santorum grabbed an early lead in Alabama’s primary election on Tuesday and battled Mitt Romney and Newt Gingrich in Mississippi, in a crucial round in the state-by-state battle for the Republican nomination to challenge President Barack Obama in November.

Front-runner Romney, who has failed to win the trust of the conservative Republican base, was hoping for a win to show he could muster the support of evangelical Christian voters in America’s southern states.

For Santorum, victories or strong finishes ahead of Gingrich will help lock up his position as the chief conservative alternative to Romney. Gingrich, who has been lagging nationally, needs a win to show he remains a viable candidate.

Returns from 6 percent of Alabama’s precincts favored Santorum with 35 percent of the vote. Gingrich had 29 and Romney had 28. Returns from 20 percent of Mississippi’s precincts showed Santorum with 34 percent, followed by Gingrich with 31 percent and Romney with 29 percent.

The fourth candidate, Texas Rep. Ron Paul, was not competing actively in the two contests and lagged far behind in single digits.

Romney holds a commanding lead in delegates to the national convention in Tampa, Florida, in August. The former Massachusetts governor is much better funded and has a superior campaign organization. What’s more, he carries the backing of the party establishment. But the conservative base distrusts his one-time moderate views on important social issues like abortion and gay rights.

Slower still to fall in behind Romney have been voters in the Deep South, where he has yet to win a primary. He won in Virginia where Santorum and Gingrich failed to qualify for the ballot and in Florida, where he carried counties with many transplanted retirees from northern states but lost those regions in northern Florida most culturally aligned with the old South.

A win in either Mississippi or Alabama would ease concerns that the Harvard-educated Mormon cannot win over the party’s most conservative and evangelical Christian voters, who play an outsized role in both Alabama and Mississippi.

Early results of exit polls of voters in both states showed born-again and evangelical Christians dominating the contests with unusually high numbers. About 8 in 10 Mississippians were in that category. They accounted for three-quarters of the voters in Alabama.

The numbers could spell good news for Santorum, a former Pennsylvania senator who has captured the hearts of his party’s base with his staunch socially conservative views. He needs a win to cement his status as Romney’s chief conservative rival.

“People of Mississippi and Alabama want a conservative,” Santorum told reporters in Biloxi, Mississippi, pressing his argument that Gingrich should consider stepping aside. “If they want a conservative nominee for sure, they can do that by lining up behind us and making this race clearly a two-person race outside of the South.”

While Gingrich insists he plans to remain in the race until the Republican National Convention, his campaign’s survival essentially rested on winning both of Tuesday’s contests. The former speaker of the House of Representatives has pursued an all-Southern strategy, but he has won only South Carolina and Georgia, the state he represented in Congress for 20 years.

Romney, meanwhile, worked to persuade lukewarm Republican voters that he is the most electable candidate.

“I’m the one guy in this race who can beat Barack Obama,” he told 400 people gathered to hear him speak in Missouri, which holds its caucuses on Saturday.

The Associated Press tally shows Romney with 454 of the 1,144 delegates needed to win the nomination. Santorum has 217, Gingrich 107 and Paul 47.

There were 107 Republican National Convention delegates at stake on Tuesday: 47 in Alabama, 37 in Mississippi, 17 in Hawaii, where caucuses were scheduled, and six more in caucuses in American Samoa.

The showdown vote occurs as new polling showed a steep drop in Obama’s approval ratings, a decline that coincides with rapidly climbing gasoline prices as a result of renewed turbulence in the Middle East. The political turmoil across the Mideast and North Africa has been exacerbated by fears that Israel is preparing a military attack on Iran’s suspected nuclear weapons program.

A Washington Post-ABC News poll found that 46 percent of those surveyed approve the way the president is handling his job, and 50 percent disapprove. A New York Times/CBS poll found 41 percent approval, and 47 percent disapproval.

Leavening those numbers, the Gallup daily tracking poll had Obama’s approval rating at 47 percent. It showed U.S. economic confidence at a four-year high.

On Tuesday, the president, who is unopposed for the Democratic nomination, won the endorsement of the AFL-CIO labor federation.