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He’s going to get his share of delegates in the land of Lincoln. He’s the best face-to-face campaigner in this race.

Newt is done in IL. There is no sign that he is viable outside that small cluster of Southern states. RCP has him at 12% in IL while Rick is at 31% and Milt at 35%. The election is in just 7 days there. There is no way he is making up that huge amount of ground. Just look at this county by county Primary results map. Newt is in Purple, Rick in Green, Milt in Orange and Paul in Yellow.

Some face-to-face job he is doing. Newt is not doing well outside of the small portion of South he staked out.

By the same token, Santorum's strong selling point has been that he can win the "Rust Belt" states in the North. He lost Michigan and Ohio, though narrowly in both cases. Despite his strong Catholic faith, Romney carried those Ohio and Michigan counties where Catholics are higher percentages of the population, notably northeast Ohio. Ditto in Iowa, where Romney or Paul carried the more Catholic eastern third of the state. Santorum did quite well in predominantly Protestant Tennessee, Kansas, and Oklahoma.

Santorum has yet to prove that he can win the "Reagan Democrats" of the North, although he has done well in an Upper South state (Tennessee) and in two Midwestern states heavily settled by Southerners (Missouri and Oklahoma). Barring a new economic downturn, Santorun has little chance of pulling many of the socially liberal but economically conservative suburban voters in the Northern and Western metro areas that voted for Obama in 2008 but moved to the GOP column in the 2010 congressional elections.