Newt Gingrich

Newt Gingrich wanted to show up in the Chicago suburbs Wednesday with two new reasons Republicans should make him their presidential nominee: Alabama and Mississippi. Instead, with two more losses and no momentum boost, he stuck to an old standby: He's the smartest guy in the race. Putting himself in the company of Abraham Lincoln and Ronald Reagan, he argued that he is the only candidate running in the GOP contests who gets science and technology and who knows how to employ it to revolutionize the federal government.

The primaries in Alabama and Mississippi rattled the race for the Republican presidential nomination, giving Rick Santorum two new notches on his gun while leaving Newt Gingrich and Mitt Romney as this week's political roadkill. Strangely, though, at this point in the campaign all the candidates look more like losers than winners - and that includes Barack Obama . Tuesday night's victor, Santorum, still does not have the organization or money he needs to run an imposing national campaign.

With early election returns from Alabama and Mississippi showing Newt Gingrich trailing Rick Santorum and exit polls not looking promising, the former House speaker's spokesman said that, whatever the results in the two states, Gingrich would press on. “Tomorrow, the sun comes up. We go to Chicago, we go on to Tampa,” R.C. Hammond told reporters at Gingrich's election night party at a hotel outside Birmingham, Ala. And he noted that...

Just one week after an indecisive Super Tuesday, voters in two Deep South states could rewrite the story line of the 2012 presidential race. The outcomes in Alabama and Mississippi are expected to be close, with any of three Republican candidates a potential winner in each state. (Hawaii has caucuses Tuesday night but the results won't be known until Wednesday in most of the country.) But when the voting in Dixie is done, the GOP contest could look very different. At the outset, the week-long Southern campaign shaped up as a conservative showdown: Rick Santorum versus Newt Gingrich in a very conservative and solidly Republican region (the last Democrat to carry either state in a presidential election was Jimmy Carter in 1976)

Scoring major upsets in the Alabama and Mississippi primaries on Tuesday, Rick Santorum dealt a potentially crippling blow to Newt Gingrich and effectively emerged as Mitt Romney's lead challenger for the Republican presidential nomination. With most of the votes tallied, Gingrich was finishing a close second to Santorum in both states, followed by Romney. Santorum's victories in the heart of the GOP's Deep South stronghold give him a burst of momentum heading into the next round of contests in Missouri, Illinois and Louisiana.

Newt Gingrich fell short in his bid Tuesday to reignite his presidential campaign with wins in two Southern primaries but did not budge from his pledge to go all the way to the Republican convention, arguing that the results from Alabama and Mississippi undercut Mitt Romney's claim to the nomination. "One of the things tonight proves is that the elite media's efforts to convince the nation that Mitt Romney is inevitable just collapsed," he told about 200 supporters in a ballroom at the Wynfrey Hotel in the suburbs south of Birmingham.

Hours from learning whether Alabama Republicans will reinvigorate his political fortunes, Newt Gingrich made a midday stop to speak to a suburban chamber of commerce, mentioning just a few times that he was running for president and not mentioning his opponents at all. Gingrich, who spoke after an expert on cyber crime, lapsed into a short discourse of the marvels of technology, extolling ATMs and the composite technology in the 787 Dreamliner....

With primaries in Alabama and Mississippi less than a day away, new polls show a tight Republican presidential contest as Newt Gingrich, Mitt Romney and Rick Santorum each have a chance to win the Deep South states. In Mississippi, Gingrich leads with 33% to Romney's 31% and Santorum's 27%, according to a survey by Public Policy Polling, a Democratic firm based in Raleigh, N.C. The firm's Alabama survey found the race there to be even closer: Romney has 31%, Gingrich has 30% and Santorum has 29%. The Southern primaries had been viewed as a battle between Gingrich and Santorum for the party's more conservative wing, but conservatives' inability to choose between the two has created an opening for Romney.

Rick Santorum scored a resounding victory Saturday in the Kansas caucuses, winning more than half of the votes, claiming most of the delegates and bolstering his credibility as he turns to other states with similar GOP electorates. Facing crucial tests in Alabama and Mississippi on Tuesday and in Missouri on Saturday, Santorum hopes to diminish Newt Gingrich so he can compete head-to-head with Mitt Romney for the party's presidential nomination. But even as Santorum added more delegates to his total, Romney collected almost as many from smaller caucuses Saturday, leaving Santorum still more than 200 behind.