For me, it was always the question. The evangelical South controls the GOP and most of the Christianist leaders backed Santorum against Gingrich at their summit earlier this year. But Newt's Southern roots and mastery of right-wing populist rhetoric always struck me as potentially more sellable in, say, Texas, than the up-tight Bill Donohue-style theocon Catholic from Pennsylvania.
But things have changed, haven't they? The national polls now show not just a Gingrich decline but a vertical one. He's in free-fall. He's gone from around 30 percent to 15 in barely three weeks. His only hope is Georgia, his home-state, or the ultras in California's ultra-right GOP base. So I think this is a Romney-Santorum race. More to the point, if Santorum wins Michigan, I think he may well win the nomination.
But even if he doesn't win Michigan, it now seems the South could warm to him, in part because he is the most anti-Obama of the anti-Obamas, the most intent on violence as the best option in foreign policy, and in part because of his long, consistent, fanatical, Christianism (especially expressed in his contempt for non-fundamentalist mainline Protestantism).
The Dish 