Rick Santorum, who won the Alabama and Mississippi primaries on Tuesday, has proven himself the conservatives' favored alternative to front-runner Mitt Romney. He did this by winning the voters who mattered most in the deep-dyed red states of Alabama and Mississippi, the white evangelical "born again" voters who cast more than two-thirds of the vote in each state.

 

If Gingrich had won these two states, he would be calling on Santorum to end his campaign and permit Gingrich to mount the kind of mano-a-mano challenge to Romney the party's rank-and-file clearly crave. Gingrich would be doing so all the more vociferously if he had won as many votes in other states as Santorum has to date. And if he had, he would have a good case.