Thaindian News

Washington, March 6 (IANS) As the Republican primary race to pick their nominee to challenge President Barack hits so-called “Super Tuesday”, the biggest day of voting yet in the two-month-old campaign, Mitt Romney remained the frontrunner.

But the former Massachusetts governor continued to face a strong challenge from former Senator Rick Santorum with polls indicating a close fight in the swing state of Ohio, a Midwestern industrial state where voters have an uncanny history of picking winners in presidential politics.

The other two candidates too have pursued varying strategies for capitalising on the day’s voting in ten states with Newt Gingrich, the former speaker of the House of Representatives, banking on winning in his home state of Georgia, where he holds the lead in polls.

And Ron Paul continues his strategy of looking for delegates in caucus states, which are more easily dominated by highly motivated supporters of the small-government, low-tax candidate.

Primaries in Ohio, Georgia, Massachusetts, Vermont, Virginia, Oklahoma and Tennessee, and caucuses in Idaho, North Dakota and Alaska make Tuesday the busiest day of the primary season.

Nearly one-third of the 1,144 delegates needed to clinch the nomination are at stake Tuesday, a larger prize than all the previous primaries and caucuses combined. The nominee will be named in late August at the Republican National Convention in Tampa, Florida.

So far, Romney leads with 203 delegates from previous contests, Santorum has 92, Gingrich has 33 and Paul, 25.

President Obama, meanwhile, is seeing his poll numbers rise in tandem with signs that the struggling US economy may be on a course toward sustained recovery.

A new NBC-Wall Street Journal poll released Monday shows him defeating all of the Republican candidates in hypothetical head-to-head matchups.

(Arun Kumar can be contacted at arun.kumar@ians.in)