Free Republic

As he struggles to keep up with frontrunner Mitt Romney and parries calls for him to drop out of the Republican presidential race, Rick Santorum has said in recent weeks that he has actually won more delegates than some media counts show. Those counts, Santorum says, are not taking into account Republican party rules, as well as the state-level meetings that actually determine how many delegates go to each candidate. "Here's one of the things that I can tell you I didn't know," Santorum told a small group of reporters at a breakfast in Washington Monday. "Every single state is...

Newt Gingrich stands to gain more than 50 delegates in the Republican presidential race, thanks to his overwhelming victory in Tuesday’s Georgia primary. .....If the totals hold, Rick Santorum would fall about 3,500 ballots shy of reaching 20 percent of the statewide vote. Failing to meet that threshold means Santorum was shut out of a share of 34 delegates awarded based on the statewide vote. Only Gingrich and Romney met that minimum percentage. Based on his vote total alone, Gingrich stands to win 16 statewide delegates; Romney 8. Under the state GOP rules, the remaining 10 statewide delegates are awarded...

One of the reasons to be skeptical that Rick Santorum could win the Republican nomination is that we now have a pretty good idea of how the vote will play out from state to state — and the coalition that he is building seems short of a majority. It is not that Mr. Santorum’s delegate deficit is mathematically insurmountable. But he’s behind, and he is very unlikely to win states like New Jersey and California that either have a lot of delegates or use winner-take-all rules to award them. That might not leave enough fertile opportunities for him to gain...