(Reuters) – Republican Mitt Romney cruised to an easy victory over top rival Rick Santorum in Illinois on Tuesday, moving him one step closer to clinching the party’s volatile battle for the presidential nomination.
Romney’s comfortable win gave him a fresh burst of momentum in the White House campaign and new ammunition for his argument that it is time for Republicans to rally around his campaign and end an increasingly bitter nominating battle.
“Elections are about choices, and today hundreds of thousands of people in Illinois have joined millions across the country to join our cause,” Romney told cheering supporters in Schaumburg, Illinois, a Chicago suburb.
“I’m offering a real choice and a new beginning,” he said, touting his business experience and ignoring his rivals to focus his criticism on President Barack Obama. “I have the vision and the experience to get us out of this mess.”
With 62 percent of the votes counted, Romney had 47 percent and Santorum, a former U.S. senator from Pennsylvania, had 35 percent. Romney’s remaining rivals, Newt Gingrich, the former U.S. House of Representatives speaker, and libertarian congressman Ron Paul, lagged badly. Gingrich was in fourth place.
Though he has failed to convince many conservatives, Romney has more than twice as many delegates to the nominating convention as Santorum, and Romney’s campaign has argued that his rivals cannot catch him in the contest to pick a challenger to Obama in the November 6 election.
Santorum and Gingrich hope to keep Romney from capturing a majority of delegates by the time the nominating contests end in June, leaving the choice up for grabs among the party’s mostly conservative delegates heading into the August nominating convention in Tampa, Florida.
“We don’t need a manager,” Santorum told supporters in Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, after the results were announced. “We need someone who is going to pull government up by the roots and throw it out.”
The win in Illinois allowed Romney to expand his lead in delegates over Santorum. Heading into the voting, Romney had 521 delegates to Santorum’s 239 in the race for the 1,144 needed to win the nomination, according to a count by CNN.
DELEGATE NUMBERS
There were 54 delegates to be allocated in Illinois from Tuesday’s voting, but Santorum was not eligible to win many of them because he failed to meet deadlines to file a slate of delegates in some districts.
Romney and Santorum had launched a new round of attacks on each other ahead of the vote, with Romney calling his rival an “economic lightweight” and Santorum accusing Romney, the former head of a private equity firm, of being “a Wall Street financier” who would have a hard time winning in November.
Santorum, a staunch social conservative, campaigned heavily in rural southern Illinois and courted conservatives who distrust Romney for the moderate stances he took as governor of liberal Massachusetts.
But the Illinois result followed a bad week for Santorum, who spent two days campaigning in Puerto Rico before losing badly there on Sunday. In an effort to minimize the importance of Romney’s business experience, he also told a campaign rally he did not care about the unemployment rate.
The diverse electorate in Illinois paid off for Romney, who has been unable to translate his substantial financial and organizational advantages into broad support in many states.
Exit polls showed Santorum won among voters who said they were Evangelical Christians, very conservative or strongly supported the conservative Tea Party movement, but those blocs were smaller than in states where Santorum has done well. Evangelicals made up about four of every 10 voters in Illinois, compared to more than seven in 10 last week in the Mississippi and Alabama primaries, which Santorum won.
Romney, a multimillionaire who has struggled to connect with blue-collar voters, slightly led Santorum as the candidate who best understood the average Americans’ problems, exit polls showed.
Despite his poor finish, Gingrich pledged to keep pushing until the convention.
“This campaign will spend between now and when the delegates vote in Tampa relentlessly taking the fight to President Obama,” Gingrich said in a statement.
WASHINGTON (AP) — Rick Santorum and Mitt Romney are in a tight race to win the Republican presidential primary in Ohio.
With 36 percent of Ohio’s precincts reporting, Santorum has 39 percent and Romney has 36 percent. Santorum has also won Tennessee and Oklahoma, while Romney has won primaries in Massachusetts, Vermont and Virginia as voters went to the polls in 10 states.
Newt Gingrich has won in his home state of Georgia.
Mitt Romney’s narrow but campaign-saving primary victory in Michigan lost some of its luster when the final outcome showed that his top rival, Rick Santorum, still won half of the state’s delegates, muddying the race ahead of 10 key state contests next Tuesday.
A win in Michigan was crucial for Romney, who was born there and whose father was governor of the state, to affirm his contention that he is his party’s best choice to defeat Democratic President Barack Obama in November.
He overcame the religious conservative Santorum by a slim margin – 41 percent to 38 percent – in the vote Tuesday by sticking to his core and mainstream Republican message of fixing the economy and reducing unemployment in a country still recovering from the worst recession in decades.
Romney is favored by much of the Republican establishment, and enjoys more campaign funds and a stronger organization than his primary rivals. But Santorum has electrified the party’s conservative base, which trusts his views on social issues such as abortion and gay rights, and considers Romney too moderate and inconsistent.
Santorum remains on solid ground heading into Super Tuesday, a day next week when 419 delegates are up for grabs in 10 states. The day could go a long way in determining who will win the state-by-state race for delegates that yields the party’s nomination at its national convention in August.
Santorum is leading the polls in Ohio, possibly the most important contest on Super Tuesday. It is a big industrial state with 8.1 percent unemployment, 63 convention delegates at stake and a long history as a battleground in general election campaigns. Santorum also is keeping an eye on two other big prizes among the 10 Super Tuesday states: Oklahoma and Tennessee.
Romney is all but assured of victories in at least two of next Tuesday’s states – Massachusetts, where he was governor and faces little or no competition in the primary, and Virginia, where neither former House speaker Newt Gingrich nor Santorum qualified for the ballot. Those two contests offer 84 delegates combined.
News that Santorum’s narrow loss in Michigan would yield him as many delegates as the winner – 15 each – enabled him to label the results a success on Romney’s home turf, putting some wind in his sails ahead of the big contests next week.
The other two candidates in the race, Gingrich and Texas Rep. Ron Paul, did not campaign in Michigan and got no delegates.
“We had a much better night in Michigan than maybe was first reported. This was a really great race to go into, in a sense, the belly of the beast, the hometown of my chief rival here in the Republican primary,” Santorum said Wednesday during a campaign stop in Tennessee.
Romney was campaigning in Ohio, where he kept on the economy, promising “more jobs, less debt and smaller government” if he’s elected in November. Romney was headed next for North Dakota, which holds caucuses Tuesday.
Gingrich and Paul made little effort in either of Tuesday’s contests in Michigan or Arizona, focusing instead on Super Tuesday. Gingrich campaigned in Georgia, the state he represented in the House of Representatives for 20 years. Paul appears to be contesting Romney in Vermont, which carries 17 delegates.
In the Associated Press tally, Romney now has 167 delegates, including all of Arizona’s 29 delegates, which he won easily on Tuesday in the day’s second race. Santorum has 87, Gingrich has 32 and Paul has 19.
It will take 1,144 delegates to win the Republican nomination for president.
The next vote happens Saturday, when Washington state holds its caucuses.
WASHINGTON (AP) — Mitt Romney scored a hard-won, home state triumph in Michigan and powered to victory in Arizona Tuesday night, gaining a two-state primary sweep over Rick Santorum and precious momentum in the most turbulent Republican presidential race in a generation.
“We didn’t win by a lot, but we won by enough,” Romney told cheering supporters in Michigan. He also tweeted his delight – and his determination: “I take great pride in my Michigan roots, and am humbled to have received so much support here these past few weeks. On to the March contests.”
Santorum was already campaigning in Ohio, one of the Super Tuesday states, when the verdict came in from Michigan.
“A month ago they didn’t know who we are, but they do now,” he told his own supporters, vowing to stay the conservative course he has set.
The two other candidates, Newt Gingrich and Ron Paul, made little effort in either state, pointing instead to next week’s 10-state collection of Super Tuesday primaries and caucuses.
Romney’s Arizona triumph came in a race that was scarcely contested, and he pocketed all of the 29 Republican National Convention delegates at stake in the winner-take-all state.
Michigan was as different as could be – a hard-fought and expensive battle in Romney’s home state that he could ill afford to lose and Santorum made every effort to win.
Returns from 82 percent of Michigan’s precincts showed Romney at 41 percent and Santorum at 38 percent. Paul was winning 12 percent of the vote to 7 percent for Gingrich. In Arizona, with votes counted from 52 percent of the precincts, Romney had 48 percent, Santorum 26, Gingrich 16 percent and Paul 8 percent.
In Michigan, 30 delegates were apportioned according to the popular vote. Two were set aside for the winner of each of the state’s 14 congressional districts. The remaining two delegates were likely to be divided between the top finishers in the statewide vote.
With his victory in Arizona, Romney had 152 delegates, according to The AP’s count,, compared to 72 for Santorum, 32 for Gingrich and 19 for Paul. It takes 1,144 to win the nomination at the Republican National Convention in Tampa next summer.
In interviews as they left their polling places, Michigan voters expressed a notable lack of enthusiasm about their choices. Just 45 percent said they strongly favored the candidate they voted for, while 38 percent expressed reservations and 15 percent said they made the choice they did because they disliked the alternatives.
The lengthening GOP nomination struggle has coincided with a rise in Democratic President Barack Obama’s prospects for a new term. A survey released during the day showed consumer confidence at the highest level in a year, and other polls show an increase in Americans saying they believe the country is on the right track.
Along with the improving economy, the long and increasingly harsh campaign, in which Gingrich and Santorum have challenged Romney as insufficiently conservative, has prompted some officials to express concern about the party’s chances of defeating Obama in the fall.
Exit polling showed a plurality of Republican voters in both Michigan and Arizona saying the most important factor to them in the primaries was that a candidate be able to beat Obama in November. Romney won that group in Michigan, where it mattered most, and also prevailed among voters in the state who said experience was the quality that mattered most.
Santorum ran particularly well among voters who cited a desire for strong conservatism or strong moral character.
The polls surveyed both primary day and absentee or early voters. Interviews were conducted at 30 polling places in each state. Early results from Arizona’s poll included interviews with 1,617 voters, including 601 absentee or early voters interviewed by phone. In Michigan it was 2,133 interviews including 412 absentee or early voters interviewed by telephone. The margin of sampling error for both polls was plus or minus 4 percentage points.
Not even the opening of polls on Tuesday brought an end to the squabbling between the two leading Republicans.
Romney accused Santorum of trying to hijack a victory in Michigan by courting Democratic votes through automated telephone calls and suggested his rival was appealing to conservatives by making the kind of “incendiary” statements he would not.
“I’m not willing to light my hair on fire to try and get support,” Romney said. “I am what I am.”
Santorum brushed aside the allegations of hijacking, saying Romney had appealed for support from independents in earlier states.
“We’re going to get voters that we need to be able to win this election. And we’re going to do that here in Michigan today,” Santorum said, referring to blue collar voters with a history of swinging between the parties.
The exit poll said about 10 percent of the day’s Michigan primary voters were Democrats.
If nothing else, the unexpected clash on Romney’s home field dramatized that two months into the campaign season – after nearly a dozen primaries and caucuses – the GOP race to pick an opponent for President Barack Obama remains unpredictable.
Unopposed for renomination, Obama timed a campaign-style appearance before United Auto Workers Union members in Washington for the same day as the Michigan primary. Attacking Republicans, he said assertions that union members profited from a taxpayer-paid rescue of the auto industry in 2008 are a “load of you know what.”
All of the Republicans running for the White House opposed the bailout, but even in the party’s Michigan primary a survey of voters leaving polling places showed about four in ten supported it.
Michigan loomed as a key test for Romney as he struggled to reclaim his early standing as front-runner in the race. The first of the industrial battleground states to vote in the nominating campaign, it is also the place where the former Massachusetts governor was born and where he won a primary when he first ran for the party nomination four years ago.
But Santorum, a former Pennsylvania senator, rolled into the state on the strength of surprising victories on Feb. 7 in caucuses in Minnesota and Colorado plus a non-binding primary in Missouri. He quickly sought to stitch together the same coalition of conservatives and tea party activists that carried him to a narrow victory in the Iowa caucuses that opened the campaign nearly two months ago.
The Michigan primary was open to Republicans or any voter who declared they were Republican for the purpose of voting, and there was precedent for an influx of outsiders influencing the outcome.
A dozen years ago, John McCain defeated the heavily favored George W. Bush, relying on the support of Michigan independents and Democrats. Exit polls then showed that Bush won 66 percent of Republican votes, while McCain won 82 percent of self-described Democrats and 67 percent of independents. Together, the non-Republican voters accounted for more than half the electorate.
In a measure this year of the state’s importance to the battle for the nomination, the two leading candidates and the super PACs that support them spent about $6 million on television advertisements, and Romney and Santorum spent much of the past 10 days crisscrossing the state in search of support.
Arizona was Romney’s to lose, judging by the behavior of his rivals, who spent little time campaigning in the state and no money advertising on its television airwaves.
In all, there were 59 delegates at stake in the two states.
Arizona awarded all 29 of its delegates to the winner of the statewide vote.
In Michigan, by contrast, 30 delegates were apportioned according to the popular vote. Two were set aside for the winner of each of the state’s 14 congressional districts. The remaining two delegates were likely to be divided between the top finishers in the statewide vote.
Romney entered the night the delegate leader in The Associated Press count.
He had 123, compared to 72 for Santorum, 32 for Gingrich and 19 for Paul. It takes 1,144 to win the nomination at the Republican National Convention in Tampa next summer.
There are 40 delegates at stake in Washington caucuses on Saturday, followed by 419 on Super Tuesday, including big state primaries in Ohio and Georgia.
Already, the television advertising wars were under way. Romney and restore Our Future, the super PAC that supports him, have spent more than $3 million combined on ads in Ohio.
In Michigan, Santorum campaigned heavily for the support of tea party activists and other non-establishment Republicans, appearing in churches at times and often dwelling on social issues, as is his custom. In a string of attention-gathering remarks in the race’s final days, he said Obama was a snob who wanted everyone to attend college, said he nearly threw up over a speech that candidate John F. Kennedy gave in 1960 about the separation of church and state, and said Romney was uniquely unqualified to defeat Obama because the two men shared so much in common on issues like health care.
The former Massachusetts governor made a play for tea party support, too, at a pair of appearances, but for the most part campaigned on his pledge to use his background as a successful businessman to help create jobs and fix the economy. Last week, he issued a call for 20 percent across-the-board cuts in personal income tax rates.
But he was hampered by off-the-cuff comments that reinforced his difficulty in reaching out to struggling voters in a state with 9.3 percent unemployment. He said at one point that his wife drives a couple of Cadillacs, and at another that he was friends with some of the owners of NASCAR teams.
At a rare news conference after the polls opened on Tuesday, he conceded that his own mistakes had hurt his campaign.
The primaries in Michigan and Arizona were the first contests since Romney squeaked out a victory over Paul in the Maine caucuses on Feb. 11, a lull of two and a half weeks.
Except for a debate in Arizona last Wednesday and a brief burst of campaigning in the hours before and after, Romney and Santorum have focused their time and campaign money on Michigan.
Polls showed Santorum racing to a large advantage after his victories on Feb. 7, before the weight of attack ads by a Romney-aligned super PAC and the candidate himself began to narrow and finally erase the gap in many surveys.
In the end, the combination of Romney and the outside group accounted for about $3.8 million in TV ads, compared to about $2.2 million for Santorum and a super PAC supporting him.
While that gave Romney an advantage, it wasn’t nearly as lopsided as in some of the earlier states.
EAST MACHIAS, Maine (AP) — Ron Paul has gained 83 votes on Mitt Romney following a Republican presidential caucus in eastern Maine, where voting last week had been postponed due to bad weather. Romney still holds a 156-vote lead over Paul in statewide totals.
Paul received 163 votes in Saturday’s Washington County caucus, where Republicans from more than two dozen towns gathered to cast their votes. Romney received 80 votes. Rick Santorum got 57 votes and Newt Gingrich received four votes.
The Maine Republican Party last week declared Romney the winner of the state’s GOP caucuses, but Washington County Republicans were angered their votes weren’t counted after their caucus was postponed last Saturday because of a snowstorm.
County Chairman Chris Gardner says the state party should include the caucus tally in the final results.
The Republican State Committee will consider the request next month.
Republican Newt Gingrich vowed on Sunday to press ahead with his struggling presidential bid after a big loss in Nevada, saying he will focus on drawing a contrast with “timid” rival Mitt Romney.
Romney, the Republican front-runner, easily thumped Gingrich in Nevada on Saturday for his second consecutive win and third in the first five contests in the state-by-state battle to pick a challenger to face Democratic President Barack Obama in the November election.
The victory gave Romney growing momentum as the race turns to the next round contests on Tuesday – in Minnesota, Colorado and Missouri – and Maine’s weeklong caucuses that conclude next Saturday.
It also raised questions about Gingrich’s future, but the former House of Representatives speaker appeared on two national morning talk shows to repeat his vow to stay in the race despite big losses in Nevada and last week in Florida.
Gingrich, a former Georgia congressman, hopes his campaign can last until 10 “Super Tuesday” contests on March 6 and several later contests in March, when votes will be taken in southern states where he expects to do well.
“My goal over the next few weeks is to draw a very sharp distinction between Romney’s positions, which are very – the Wall Street Journal described them as timid – and in terms of tax policies, being like Obama,” he said on NBC’s “Meet the Press.”
“I hope by the time we get to Super Tuesday that I will have made the case that a genuine conservative is a dramatically better choice to defeat Barack Obama,” he said on CBS’s “Face the Nation.”
Gingrich said he hoped to pull close to even with Romney in delegates for the nomination after the Texas primary in early April.
First he will have to survive February. New polls on Sunday showed Gingrich could face a challenge from Rick Santorum, who has been vying with Gingrich to be the conservative alternative to the more moderate Romney.
A Public Policy Polling survey showed Romney with a comfortable 14-point lead in Colorado over Santorum, a former U.S. senator from Pennsylvania, with Gingrich in third. In Minnesota, Santorum had a slight 2-point edge on Romney with Gingrich in third.
In Missouri, which is a non-binding primary that does not award delegates, Gingrich is not even on the ballot.
‘BIG DAY FOR SANTORUM’
“Tuesday has the potential to be a big day for Rick Santorum,” the Public Policy Polling memo said.
Santorum said he believed he would pick up steam in the race as it moves beyond the first five contests and broadened to states where Romney, the former Massachusetts governor, has not spent as much time organizing and campaigning.
“I think we’re going to show improvement. This race is a long, long way from being over,” he said on “Fox News Sunday.” “We believe that if you look at the national polls, our numbers are moving up.”
The Romney campaign went on the attack against Santorum on Sunday, issuing a statement to reporters renewing criticism of his record in the Senate backing spending bills and local spending projects known as earmarks.
“Rick Santorum is part of the big-spending Washington establishment that ran up the national debt by trillions and stuck our grandchildren with the bill,” Romney spokeswoman Andrea Saul said.
Santorum finished a distant fourth in Nevada, behind Romney, Gingrich and U.S. Representative Ron Paul, whose third-place showing was a disappointment after spending time and building a campaign organization in the state.
Paul said on ABC’s “This Week” he was not sure where he might score a victory in the race. Santorum and Gingrich have each won one state, Iowa and South Carolina respectively, while Romney has won New Hampshire, Florida and Nevada.
“It’s hard to say exactly when, but we have three or four caucus states that we believe our numbers are doing pretty good, so we have to just wait and see and continue to do exactly what we’re doing,” Paul said.
Romney took command of the Republican race with his victory in Nevada, where he won a broad cross-section of Republican voters including conservatives, moderates and Tea Party movement supporters.
But while vote totals were not complete on Sunday afternoon, Romney’s 48 percent showing was slightly short of the 51 percent he received when he won Nevada during his failed 2008 presidential campaign.
Gingrich and Santorum said Romney had failed to seal the deal with Republican voters and there was still room for another candidate to confront him.
“The challenge is to say, do you really want to go into a fall election with a moderate candidate?” Gingrich said. “The difference between timidly trying to manage at the margins a system that has to be profoundly changed and boldly taking it on, is a very, very big difference.”
Gingrich and Romney both took the day off the campaign trail on Sunday, when many Americans were more focused on the Super Bowl football championship than on politics.
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(Reuters) – Republican Mitt Romney cruised to an easy victory over top rival Rick Santorum in Illinois on Tuesday, moving him one step closer to clinching the party’s volatile battle for the presidential nomination.
