United Liberty

Despite the delegate math looking very favorably to Mitt Romney, Rick Santorum and Newt Gingrich are continuing to hope that they can peel enough support away to prevent him from winning the nomination outright. And while a brokered convention may be a slight possibility, Romney’s rivals will need to improve their numbers if they hope to catch up, as Tim Carney noted last week at the Washington Examiner.

For Santorum, a lack of campaign organizaton may lead to an embarassing situtation in his home state of Pennsylvania. According to The Daily, Santorum could win the state and still not take home any delegates:

As Rick Santorum desperately tries to make a dent in Mitt Romney’s formidable delegate lead, he faces an unlikely obstacle on the primary calendar: his home state of Pennsylvania.

Yes, Santorum is currently favored — though hardly a lock — to win the popular vote in the state he represented in Congress for 16 years.

But Pennsylvania’s non-binding primary rules for distributing delegates raise the prospect that Santorum, who has said he’ll win the vast majority of the state’s delegates, could actually come away from next month’s primary empty-handed at a time when he can ill-afford it.

Which means the April 24 primary could represent yet another chance for Romney — who kicked off his Pennsylvania campaign this week by trotting out supportive Republican leaders — to finally deal Santorum a knockout blow.

“Winning the state doesn’t mean you get the delegates,” said Alan Novak, a former state GOP chairman who’s supporting Romney. “Most of the delegates will be political professionals, and it’s not their first rodeo.”

The problem for Santorum springs from the fact that potential delegates in Pennsylvania run on a primary ballot uncommitted to any presidential candidate — meaning voters won’t know who they’ll support at the convention this summer.
[…]
Romney, Ron Paul and even Newt Gingrich got some of their supporters on the ballot as delegate candidates. But Santorum’s campaign officials, who have struggled with ballot organization issues across the country, privately concede that they just didn’t have the time, nor resources, to organize their own supporters to run as delegates when the paperwork was due earlier this year.

“At this point the delegate candidates are lined up everywhere but with Rick,” said Charlie Gerow, a longtime GOP strategist supporting Gingrich.

And in Illinois, a state that Nate Silver called a “must win” for Santorum, Romney is maintaining a decent lead over his rivals, according to the latest poll from Rasmussen out of Land of Lincoln:

• Romney: 41%
• Santorum: 32%
• Gingrich: 14%
• Paul: 7%

And Public Policy Polling shows a bigger divide between Romney and Santorum ahead of tomorrow’s primary in Illinois:

• Romney: 45%
• Santorum: 30%
• Gingrich: 12%
• Paul: 10%

Like it or not, the remaining states look favorable to Romney, who won handily yesterday in Puerto Rico. Unless Gingrich drops out, which looks unlikely right now, it’s hard to see how Romney doesn’t get the nomination.