Republicans Court US Southerners In Tuesday Vote

WASHINGTON (AP) — Mitt Romney hoped for a breakout victory in primary votes in America’s conservative deep South on Tuesday, looking for a win in Alabama or Mississippi that would accelerate his campaign for the Republican nomination to challenge President Barack Obama in the November general election.

The former Massachusetts governor holds a commanding lead in delegates to the national convention in Tampa, Florida, in August. He is facing, however, tough challenges in the two southern states from rivals Rick Santorum and Newt Gingrich, who were battling it out to emerge as the sole conservative challenger to more moderate Romney, a patrician multimillionaire who amassed his fortune as a venture capitalist.

The deeply conservative base of Republican voters nationwide has been slow to embrace Romney, distrusting him over moderate stands in the past on social issues like abortion and gay marriage. Slower still to fall in behind Romney have been voters in the South, where he has yet to win a primary.

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.

A win in either Mississippi or Alabama would be an important breakthrough for Romney, easing concerns that the Harvard-educated Northeasterner cannot win the party’s most conservative and evangelical Christian voters. Romney did not plan to be in the either state during voting Tuesday and was already looking ahead to contests in Missouri on Saturday and Puerto Rico on Sunday.

Gingrich, the former speaker of the House of Representatives, is banking on a strong showing Tuesday to keep his candidacy alive. Santorum, a former Pennsylvania senator, is laboring to prove his claim that Romney — who is way ahead in the delegate count — can’t secure the support of the powerful conservative bloc in the Republican base.

Santorum, who has angled to campaign head to head with Romney, pressed the case again that Gingrich should consider stepping aside so the conservative vote could coalesce around a single challenger to Romney.

“People of Mississippi and Alabama want a conservative,” he told reporters in Biloxi, Mississippi. “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 in August, his campaign’s survival essentially rested on winning both Tuesday contests. The former House speaker has pursued an all-Southern strategy, but he has won only South Carolina and Georgia, the latter the state he represented in Congress for 20 years.

Gingrich and Santorum both spoke at an energy forum in Mississippi and took questions on religion in public life at a presidential forum in Birmingham. They took sharp aim at Obama, with Santorum labeling the president’s foreign policy “pathetic” and Gingrich taunting Obama as “President Algae” for an energy speech in which Obama spoke of research that would allow oil and gas to be developed from algae one day.

Gingrich has focused his campaign in recent weeks on rising gas prices, promising to bring the price to $2.50 per gallon if elected.

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

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. He fared poorly in the southern states in his 2008 presidential run.

A fourth candidate, libertarian-leaning Texas Rep. Ron Paul, was not competing actively in the two contests.

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