Sean Trende: “By looking at nothing more than the percentage of Mormons, evangelicals, African-Americans, Latinos, and college-educated voters in counties that voted from South Carolina through Super Tuesday, you could forecast Romney’s vote share within five points in 103 of the 146 counties in Alabama and Mississippi that have returned votes so far. You’d be within 10 points in all but nine. It’s not that great of an exaggeration to say that all the advertising, campaigning, gaffes, and everything else are superfluous to these underlying factors right now.”

“As I’ve said before, if this continues onward, Romney won’t get 1,144 delegates until June, if at all.”

“The thing I find most disheartening about this campaign is the difficulty of talking about positive ideas on a large scale because the news media can’t cover it and candidly, my opponents can’t comprehend it.”

— Newt Gingrich, quoted by NBC News, adding that “our political system is so methodically and deliberately stupid.”

Washington Post: “It happened more than a quarter century ago, at the start of a Romney family summer vacation. But the tale of Seamus, the Irish setter who got sick while riding 12 hours on the roof of Mitt Romney’s faux-wood-paneled station wagon, is ballooning into a narrative of epic proportions. It has come to characterize the candidate — and not in the favorable way Tagg Romney hoped for when he first talked in 2007 about his family’s annual road trips.”

“The idea that the Republicans have to be organized before Labor Day or they will be out of the race I think is a fundamental misunderstanding of television, the internet, you know YouTube, all the things we now communicate with. A very exciting Republican Party that actually talked about ideas and actually had a fight over the platform based on real ideas, I think might be a more interesting party than one which nominates somebody who’s boring for five months.”

— Newt Gingrich, in ABC News interview on January 13, 2008, advocating a brokered convention.

Ron Paul “has sent discreet signals to Camp Romney” suggesting he might be willing to trade his support in the GOP presidential race, Alex Altman reports.

“Aides say if Paul can’t win the nomination, four legislative priorities would top the Texas Representative’s wish list: deep spending cuts that lead to a balanced budget; the restoration of civil liberties; a commitment to reclaim the legislative branch’s right to declare war, which it abdicated to the executive branch in recent decades; and reforms that shore up the U.S. monetary system, such an audit of the Federal Reserve or competing-currency legislation.”

Paul might also be enticed “by the prospect of serving as a presidential adviser, a Cabinet position for someone in his orbit or ‘perhaps a vice presidency.’ Not for himself, but rather his son. Rand Paul, the junior senator from Kentucky and a Tea Party icon, is expected to launch his own White House bid in 2016. Being on the ticket now – or even being mentioned for it – would be a helpful step.”

BuzzFeed: “Mitt Romney could have assured himself victory months in advance in the now-crucial primary state of Illinois, but instead his Illinois campaign operation chose to allow Rick Santorum’s delegates to remain on the ballot despite a failure to meet signature requirements.”

“The decision produced a quiet storm of outrage among Romney’s allies in the state, who were bewildered by the decision to make a slam-dunk race competitive, and to grant an opening in the desperate scramble to reach the 1,144 delegates required for the Republican nomination.”

A new Wilson Perkins Allen survey in Texas shows Rick Santorum leading the Republican presidential race with 35%, followed by Mitt Romney at 27%, Newt Gingrich at 20% and Ron Paul at 8%.

The Texas primary is on May 29, and it is the second-biggest delegate prize behind California.

A new Quinnipiac poll in Pennsylvania shows favorite son Rick Santorum with a big lead over his GOP presidential rivals at 36%, followed by Mitt Romney at 22%, Ron Paul at 12% and Newt Gingrich at 8%.

The Pennsylvania primary isn’t until April 24.

“I am not recommending prostitution to anyone, nor did I say I
engaged with prostitutes. I
took my wife. She was the only non-hooker on board.”

— Montana gubernatorial candidate Neil Livingstone (R), quoted by the AP, explaining one of the “spectacular list of exploits” included in his biography..

First Read: “What is his campaign about? He says he wants to ‘restore America’s greatness,’ but what does that mean? (Go back to the ’50s? The ’60s? The ’80s? The Bush years?) He says he’ll be able to turn around the economy, but what if it’s already slowly improving as the evidence currently suggests? And the campaign makes it clear that Romney is the inevitable nominee, but what happens if that inevitable nominee loses? Team Romney has had a message problem since this campaign began, and when you make your candidacy about electability and process, you’re going to pay a BIG price for losing to candidates. Why does Romney want to be president, an office he’s been running for the past six years? Has he really answered this basic question?”

A new Pew Research survey finds that 59% of American voters say that President Obama is likely to be re-elected if his opponent is Mitt Romney.

If the contest is between Obama and Rick Santorum, 68% anticipate an Obama victory.

President Obama took British Prime Minister David Cameron to a NCAA basketball game in Ohio yesterday and is rewarded with the front-page of the Dayton Daily News and this headline: “The heartland is what it’s all about.”

The full quote from a half time interview: “Sometimes when we have foreign visitors, they’re only visiting the
coasts. They go to New York,
they go to Washington, they go to Los Angeles, but the heartland is what
it’s all about.”