Mitt Romney wins statewide Republican primary with 43% of vote

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Mitt Romney continued to pull away in the Republican presidential race Tuesday with a sweep of three primaries in Wisconsin, Maryland, and Washington, D.C.

With almost all the Wisconsin returns in, Romney won the statewide vote 43 to 38 percent over Santorum, with Ron Paul third at 12 percent and Newt Gingrich fourth at 6 percent.

That gave Romney all 18 statewide delegates, and he received 15 more by winning in five of the eight congressional districts, for a total of 33 delegates.

Santorum won nine Wisconsin delegates by carrying the 3rd, 7th, and 8th congressional districts. That’s pretty much the western third and northern half of the state where Santorum was the only candidate to make appearances, except in the Green Bay and Fox Valley areas.

Romney now has more than half the available convention delegates so far with 658. The Associated Press’ national count shows Rick Santorum a distant second at 281.

Almost six of every 10 delegates are in Romney’s pocket as the primary season just passed the halfway point. One of Romney’s chief Wisconsin supporters, Janesville House Republican Paul Ryan, said the former Massachusetts governor became the “prohibitive front-runner” Tuesday night.

Santorum needs a daunting 80-percent of the remaining delegates to win the nomination. While he told supporters he won’t give up, Ryan says the former Pennsylvania senator is “not viable anymore.”

At his victory party in Milwaukee Tuesday night, Romney said the Democratic President Barack Obama has become “a little out of touch” with Americans. He said Obama and other liberals want a strong economy but, “In everything they do, they show they don’t like business very much.”

That was in response to Obama’s first major salvo of the campaign, a speech he gave to Associated Press editors at their annual meeting in Washington. The president slammed the Republican federal budget plan drafted by Janesville’s Paul Ryan which passed the House last week. The president called it a “radical” budget and “thinly veiled social Darwinism.”

Obama accused the GOP of becoming so extreme that not even Ronald Reagan, one of the most admired Republicans in recent history, could win a Republican primary today.

Romney is just now focusing on November. He’s got a lot of ground to make up.

Obama’s campaign has 10 times more money and five times more staff members. And he’s got history on his side. Only one Republican has defeated an incumbent Democratic president in the last century. That was Reagan, who unseated Jimmy Carter in 1980.

With 3662 of 3755 Wisconsin precincts counted, Romney had 305,740 votes; Santorum, 270,686; Ron Paul, 83,969; Newt Gingrich, 43,893; Michele Bachmann, 5,813; and Jon Huntsman, 4,933. There were 4,058 uninstructed ballots cast.

Tags: news, wisconsin, politics