Romney, Rivals Court Southerners In Tuesday Vote

BILOXI, Mississippi (AP) — Republican presidential contenders campaigned aggressively on the eve of Tuesday’s primaries in Alabama and Mississippi. The outcome in the deep South votes stood to either to solidify or shake Mitt Romney’s standing as front-runner.

The two states are among the most conservative in the United States, and offer Romney and his rivals a platform for their attacks on President Barack Obama.

The former Massachusetts governor along with Rick Santorum and Newt Gingrich are focusing on the president’s handling of the economy and energy policy as gasoline prices skyrocket.

The balloting pits Romney, a moderate who also was chief executive of a successful venture capital firm, against the more-conservative Gingrich, a former U.S. House Speaker, and Santorum, a former Pennsylvania senator.

Gingrich is banking on a strong showing Tuesday to keep his candidacy alive. Santorum is laboring to prove his claim that Romney — who is way ahead in delegate counts — can’t secure the support of conservatives, particularly evangelical Christians who are a powerful bloc in the Republican base.

“If the opportunity provides itself in an open convention, they’re not going to nominate a moderate Massachusetts governor who has been outspending his opponent 10-1 and can’t win the election outright,” Santorum said of Romney in a television interview as he campaigned in Alabama and Mississippi.

Romney countered, also on television.

“We’re closing the deal, state by state, delegate by delegate,” he said, emphasizing his lead.

He has more delegates than his rivals combined, and is amassing them at a rate that puts him on track to clinch control of nomination before the convention opens in late summer.

The Associated Press delegate tally shows Romney with 454 of the 1,144 delegates needed to win the nomination. Santorum has 217, and Gingrich has accumulated 107. Texas Sen. Ron Paul, a libertarian-leaning Republican, has just 47.

Given the outsized power of evangelical Christians, Romney, who is a Mormon, could face a natural obstacle.

Four years ago, 77 percent of Republican primary voters in Alabama and 69 percent in Mississippi said they were born again Christians or evangelicals, a group that Romney has struggled to bring to his side in the primaries. His best showing in a contested primary was 38 percent in Florida.

Santorum and Gingrich employed different approaches as they campaigned during the day. Santorum increased his criticism of Romney, while Gingrich focused his attacks on Obama.

Santorum said his two main rivals have changed positions on the issue of global warming.

“I didn’t change as the climate changed. I stood tall. Now the climate has changed and everyone’s for drilling (for oil) now … but understand that when times were tough, they were not and I was,” he said.

Gingrich, at the same conference, said Obama is presiding over a “very anti-fossil fuel administration. The left wing environmental movement hates oil.”

Romney made the economy his focus for criticizing Obama.

He said the president wrongly thinks the country is doing better because of recent increases in employment. More than 200,000 jobs have been created in each of the past three months.

But Romney said the president, “should go out and talk to the 24 million Americans who are out of work or stopped looking for work or are unemployed.”

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Associated Press writers David Espo and Beth Fouhy in Mississippi and Steven R. Hurst in Washington contributed to this story.