Republican Presidential Candidate, 2012 Republican Presidential Candidate | featured news

Rick Santorum hopes to muscle Newt Gingrich out the race Tuesday and to force a face-off with Mitt Romney. But CNN's Candy Crowley reports Gingrich shows no signs of quitting.

A new poll Monday showed Mitt Romney is surprisingly strong in two Republican presidential primary contests in the South this week that are crucial to his conservative rivals Rick Santorum and Newt Gingrich.

Newt Gingrich may occasionally refer to a Twitter hash tag as a hash mark but he is relying on the Internet to reach out to voters, one tweet and Facebook friend at a time.

Rick Santorum won the Kansas caucuses in a rout on Saturday and Republican presidential front-runner Mitt Romney countered in Wyoming, a weekend prelude to suddenly pivotal Southern primary showdowns in the week ahead.

Setting the stage for primary elections Tuesday in Alabama and Mississippi, Republicans in Kansas gathered Saturday for their presidential caucuses. Forty delegates are at stake.

As the GOP presidential race shifts to the South, Newt Gingrich has a slight edge over Mitt Romney in a new Mississippi poll.

Edward Morrissey says none of the candidates hit their targets for moving ahead on Super Tuesday, but hung on just enough to keep the crown out of Romney's reach

Mitt Romney apparently pulled off a narrow victory over Rick Santorum in Ohio on Super Tuesday. But Mr. Santorum scored victories elsewhere, competing with Mr. Romney’s achievement of collecting the most delegates and all but ensuring another round of intense infighting on the road to the Republican presidential nomination. Far from bringing new clarity to the race as some in the party had hoped, Tuesday’s results gave every candidate cause to keep driving forward —including Newt Gingrich, who won a definitive victory in Georgia. They also dashed Mr. Romney’s hope of using the night to assert himself as the inevitable nominee.

NBC News projects that Rick Santorum has won in Tennessee; Mitt Romney seen capturing Massachusetts, Vermont and Virginia while Newt Gingrich takes Georgia; Ohio is too close to call and Oklahoma is too early to call.

It is the temptation of the columnist to universalize the moment — to present transient trends as exceptional, predictive and permanent. A direction is presented as a destiny. A snapshot is expanded into an epic. But history — driven by decisive contingencies — pays little mind.