Alabama and Mississippi may play a
negligible role in the general election as reliably red states, but
that's what makes them so vital in the Republican presidential primary
contest.
The two states vote Tuesday, along with
Hawaii, and together provide 90 delegates to the overall GOP contest,
which both Rick Santorum and Newt Gingrich need badly to stay
competitive against Mitt Romney.
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Alabama and Mississippi get more delegate
bang-for-the-buck at the GOP convention than their relative population
sizes because the states have heavily Republican-leaning congressional
delegations, which are used to apportion delegates in the Republican
National Convention.
Turnout for Tuesday's primary election in
Alabama is expected to be high, though not record-setting. Secretary of
State Beth Chapman is forecasting 28.9 percent of voters will
participate. That compares to states like Virginia, with 49 delegates,
where just 5 percent of the electorate turned out.
Two Alabama polls released Friday show
Gingrich and Romney fighting for the top spot, with Santorum a close
third. But Santorum, off a victory in the Kansas caucuses Saturday, says
he's "within striking distance."
According to Tom Vocino, director of the
Center for Leadership and Public Policy at Alabama State University,
polling indicates that Gingrich and Santorum are competing for the same
voters in Alabama. When one goes up in the polls, the other drops, he
said.
It's a "tough battleground," Santorum
acknowledged Sunday, saying the two states are in Gingrich's "backyard,"
forcing him to run an "insurgent campaign."
"If he's successful in Alabama and
Mississippi, he will knock Gingrich out of the box," said Curtis Gans,
director of the Center for the Study of the American Electorate at
American University.
Still, Gingrich, who has banked his third comeback in the race on his "southern strategy," says he's feeling pretty confident.
"I think we'll win both. We're campaigning
very aggressively in both states," he told "Fox News Sunday." Gingrich
said he's traveling between Birmingham, Ala., and destinations in
Mississippi over the next two days. Santorum is also traversing the
border between the states.
"I think there's a fair chance we'll win," a
Gingrich aide told The Associated Press about the contests in Alabama
and Mississippi. "But I just want to set this to rest once and for all.
We're going to Tampa," sight of the GOP's national convention this
summer.
Gingrich would need to do very well to stay
in a race that has doled out about 36 percent of the delegates up for
grabs so far. The nominee will need 1,144 delegates to win. So far,
Romney is keeping a wide lead overall -- garnering 454 delegates, nearly
40 percent of the way to the total needed to secure the nomination.
That's compared to 217 for Santorum and 107 for Gingrich and 47 for Ron
Paul, according to The Associated Press tally used by most news
agencies.
For Romney, the former governor of
Massachusetts, a Southern breakthrough would show he has the ability to
win the support of evangelical voters. And it can be done.
"Romney would have to totally collapse and
Gingrich would have to probably drop out" for Santorum to have a shot to
win, Sam Fisher, a political science professor at the University of
South Alabama in Mobile, told the Alabama Press-Register.
Romney says it may take an act of God for his rivals to catch up. But in the South, that's not a far-fetched concept.
For Santorum to win the nomination, he would
need about 63 percent of the remaining delegates up for grabs. Romney
would need about 48 percent to secure the nomination while Gingrich
would have to collect 71 percent of the remainder to get the nomination.
Santorum said it's not impossible for him to
catch up, particularly because he still has big contests in Texas,
where he's running far ahead, and his home state of Pennsylvania.
"Romney has secured a lot (of delegates) but
... they're not bound," Santorum told NBC's "Meet the Press." He added
that many delegates remain uncommitted or could change their mind.
"The news agency apportioned delegates that had nothing to do with reality," Santorum said.
The Associated Press contributed to this report.
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