Romney fails to deliver, Newt wins big

COLUMBIA, South Carolina – Newt Gingrich won big in the South Carolina’s primary Republican primary Saturday. The former congressional leader’s win allows him “to claim the mantle as the alternative to Romney” and hot up the race to choose President Barack Obama’s challenger.

Mitt Romney, a former Massachusetts governor, had looked for a South Carolina victory to make him the all-but-inevitable Republican nominee. Instead, his crushing defeat will likely drag out for months the race for the Republican presidential candidate.

With the Texas governor Rick Perry dropping out the Jan. 31 primary in the big battleground state of Florida Gingrich will look to coalesce the conservative wing of the Republican party under his banner.

Still, Gingrich’s campaign will have to face many obstacles. First of all his lack of money and organization then his “extramarital affairs, two divorces, an ethics reprimand when he was speaker of the House of Representatives, and questions about his post-Congress business dealings,” reports the AP. But to underestimate him would be a mistake since he has “rebounded to win what many consider the most important of the first three primaries.”

In his victory speech, Gingrich urged supporters to donate and get involved. “We don’t have the kind of money that at least one of the candidates has,” he said in a reference to Romney. “And we proved here in South Carolina that people powered with the right ideas beats big money.”

Returns from 95 percent of the state’s precincts showed Gingrich with 41 percent of the vote to 27 percent for Romney. Santorum, a former senator, was winning 17 percent and Texas congressman Ron Paul 13 percent. Santorum has been unable to build on his narrow victory in the first contest, the Jan. 3 Iowa caucuses, where he was officially declared the winner just Friday.

Romney, who easily won the New Hampshire primary, has cast himself the candidate most likely to beat Obama. But South Carolina voters weren’t persuaded. Voters who said they cared most about picking a candidate who could defeat Obama favored Gingrich, according to an exit poll conducted by Edison Research for The Associated Press and U.S. television networks.

Romney had a wide lead in South Carolina opinion polls following his victory in the Jan. 10 New Hampshire primary. But he had a difficult week as Iowa, where he had initially been declared a winner, was awarded to Santorum.