GOP race turns to Colorado, Minnesota

KASIE HUNT

SHANNON McCAF­FREY

Asso­ci­ated Press

LAS VEGAS — Now it’s on to Col­orado, Min­nesota and Maine.

With back-to-back vic­to­ries fuel­ing him, Repub­li­can pres­i­den­tial front-runner Mitt Rom­ney is look­ing toward the next states that hold GOP nom­i­nat­ing con­tests as main rival Newt Gin­grich brushes aside any talk of aban­don­ing his White House bid __ all but ensur­ing the bat­tle will stretch into the spring if not beyond.

Shortly after los­ing big to Rom­ney here, the for­mer House speaker emphat­i­cally renewed his vow to cam­paign into the party con­ven­tion in Tampa this sum­mer. His goal, he said, was to “find a series of vic­to­ries which by the end of the Texas pri­mary will leave us at par­ity” with Rom­ney by early April.

Gin­grich con­tin­ued to shrug off Nevada’s cau­cus results in an appear­ance on Sun­day on NBC’s Meet the Press.”

“This is the state he won last time, and he won it this time,” he said of Rom­ney. “Our goal is to get to Super Tues­day where we’re in much more favor­able territory.”

But first, Gin­grich must make it through Col­orado and Min­nesota, which both hold cau­cuses Tues­day. Maine fol­lows on Sat­ur­day dur­ing a month that promises to be as plod­ding as Jan­u­ary was rapid-fire in the pres­i­den­tial race. Rom­ney will look to main­tain his posi­tion of strength, if not build upon it, as his rivals con­tinue work­ing to derail him even as their options for doing so nar­row with each vic­tory he notches.

The for­mer Mass­a­chu­setts gov­er­nor held a double-digit lead Sun­day morn­ing over his near­est pur­suer as the totals mounted in Nevada, where fel­low Mor­mons accounted for roughly a quar­ter of all caucus-goers. Gin­grich and Texas Rep. Ron Paul vied for a dis­tant sec­ond. For­mer Penn­syl­va­nia Sen. Rick San­to­rum trailed the field.

San­to­rum won the lead­off cau­cuses in Iowa and has trailed in the con­tests since then. He nonethe­less insisted on Sun­day that “our num­bers are mov­ing up continually.”

“I think we’re going to show improve­ment. This race is a long long way from being over,” San­to­rum said on Fox News Sunday.

And on ABC’s “This Week,” Paul main­tained the results show vot­ers are still up for grabs.

“I get ener­gized because I know there’s a large num­ber of peo­ple who are look­ing for another option,” Paul said.

With votes from 71 per­cent of the precinct cau­cuses tal­lied, Rom­ney had 48 per­cent, Gin­grich 23 per­cent, Paul 19 per­cent and San­to­rum 11 per­cent. Turnout was down sig­nif­i­cantly from 2008, when Rom­ney also won the state’s GOP caucuses.

More than 24 hours after cau­cuses began, results from the state’s most pop­u­lous county were still being tal­lied. The out­come could affect the sec­ond– and third-place finishers.

“Our goal is to fin­ish ver­i­fi­ca­tion,” said Clark County GOP spokes­woman Bob­bie Hase­ley. “There is no mod­ern tech­nol­ogy when it comes to how the vot­ing took place and the counting.”

Romney’s vic­tory capped a week that began with his double-digit win in the Florida pri­mary. That con­test was as intense as Nevada’s cau­cuses were sedate __ so quiet that they pro­duced lit­tle tele­vi­sion adver­tis­ing, no can­di­date debates and only a mod­est invest­ment of time by the contenders.

A total of 28 Repub­li­can National Con­ven­tion del­e­gates were at stake in cau­cuses held across the sprawl­ing state. Rom­ney won at least 10, Gin­grich at least four, Paul at least three and San­to­rum at least two. Eight were still to be determined.

That gives Rom­ney a total of 97, includ­ing endorse­ments from Repub­li­can National Com­mit­tee mem­bers who will auto­mat­i­cally attend the con­ven­tion and can sup­port any can­di­date they choose. Gin­grich has 30, San­to­rum 16 and Paul seven. It will take 1,144 del­e­gates to win the Repub­li­can nomination.

Pre­lim­i­nary results of a poll of Nevada Repub­li­cans enter­ing their cau­cuses showed that nearly half said the most impor­tant con­sid­er­a­tion in their deci­sion was a candidate’s abil­ity to defeat Pres­i­dent Barack Obama this fall, a find­ing in line with other states.

About one-quarter of those sur­veyed said they were Mor­mon, roughly the same as in 2008, when Rom­ney won with more than a major­ity of the vote in a multi-candidate field.

The entrance poll was con­ducted by Edi­son Research for The Asso­ci­ated Press at 25 ran­domly selected cau­cus sites. It included 1,553 inter­views and had a mar­gin of sam­pling error of plus or minus 4 per­cent­age points.

Posted by AP News on Feb 5 2012. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS Feed. Comments can be made below.