BILOXI, Miss. (AP) — Rick Santorum’s strategy for becoming the Republican presidential nominee comes down to this: prevent Mitt Romney from winning enough delegates to arrive at the GOP convention this summer with a mandate and persuade delegates to ignore election results in their states.
The hope is that delegates will go with Santorum as the more conservative option over front-runner Romney. But there’s a hitch: Newt Gingrich is refusing to quit the race.
It’s a long-shot gamble for a candidate who began as long shot and badly trails Romney in delegates leading to the August convention in Tampa, Fla., where Republicans will pick a challenger to President Barack Obama.
Adding to Santorum’s money and organizational challenges is the fact that Gingrich is splitting the conservative vote and is dismissing pressure by Santorum to drop out after losing this past week in Alabama and Mississippi.
Not that Santorum, who has defied expectations to become Romney’s chief challenger, seems daunted by the odds.
“You’ve been listening to math class and delegate math class instead of looking at the reality of the situation,” the former Pennsylvania senator told reporters in Biloxi last week. “It’s going to be very difficult for anyone to get to the number of delegates that is necessary to win with the majority at the convention.”
“This isn’t about math,” Santorum says. “This is about vision.”
So far, it’s all adding up for Romney.
He has captured 495 delegates, more than all of his rivals combined. Santorum stands at 252, Gingrich has 131 and Ron Paul is at 48, according to an Associated Press projection. That puts Romney on pace to win the required 1,144 delegates in June.
Romney’s advisers claim it would take an “act of God,” as one put it, for Santorum to take the lead in the delegate count. “If he is able to pull off a miracle so be it. He’ll be the nominee,” Romney said.
Santorum, whose Catholic faith is central to his campaign, was not amused. “I don’t know about him, but I believe in acts of God,” Santorum said.
One of his strategist’s, John Patrick Yob, put it another way in a recent memo that said the Romney team’s focus on the delegate count was an effort to distract from what Santorum’s campaign claims is trouble the front-runner faces in county, district and state conventions, where delegates are locked in.
Historically, delegates take their cues from the voters who participate in the primaries and caucuses.
