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WASHINGTON — The political ad wars are coming to Tennessee, courtesy of the big money groups that are dumping millions of dollars into the GOP presidential race. Restore Our Future, a group backing Mitt Romney's campaign, has bought nearly $1 million worth of radio and TV airtime for an ad blasting GOP rival Rick Santorum as "the ultimate Washington insider." The 30-second spot began running statewide last Tuesday and will continue airing right up to Election Day on March 6. The ad marks the first spending in Tennessee by so-called "super PACs," the new breed of political action committees that...

A new poll shows Republican presidential candidate Newt Gingrich with a significant lead in his home state of Georgia. The Landmark/ Rosetta Stone poll of 1,300 Georgia voters gives Gingrich a 13-point lead over opponent Rick Santorum and a 19-point lead over Mitt Romney. Garnering 38 percent of voters there is good news for the former House Speaker of Georgia who, just one week ago, played down expectations and said that it is possible that he could lose. "Look, given this kind of a year, who knows?" Gingrich told reporters on February 16. However, on Fox News Sunday last week,...

Republican presidential contender Rick Santorum is getting some good news this week out of the Rust Belt, a region that is expected to play a critical role in the 2012 election. The Red, White and Blue Fund (RWB Fund), a super PAC backing Santorum, announced Friday it's spending $257,000 to buy ad time in Ohio, a key swing state. The investment comes a week and a half before "Super Tuesday" on March 6, when Ohio and nine other states will hold their nominating contests. A Quinnipiac poll from earlier this month showed Santorum leading among likely Ohio Republican primary voters...

GINGRICH: No. It just means that we're going to have to pick up all those delegates in late May, just before the California primary, when we hope to pick up more delegates out here. That still means that on super-Tuesday, we're looking at Georgia, Tennessee, Oklahoma, we're looking at Ohio. It means the week after super- Tuesday, we're looking at Alabama and Mississippi. Now, we have hopes that we're going to keep picking up delegates everywhere and continue. This race is going on for a long time, I think. And what Texas moving back means, combined with California being in...

Mitt Romney will not take part in March 1 debate in Georgia, the final debate before Super Tuesday on March 6, his campaign said Thursday. And Rick Santorum looks like he will sit it out as well. [snip] By not attending the debate, Romney’s campaign appears to be trying to de-emphasize its importance and instead relying on his overwhelming financial advantage on the airwaves. Romney’s campaign and a super PAC supporting him have all but drowned out their opponents with ads. The debate is in the state Gingrich represented in the U.S. House, but both Romney and Santorum have signaled...

.........Verniece Zorn, a 70-year-old retired printing company worker, said she made a promise to herself years ago that if Gingrich ever ran for president, she would support him. She liked the newsletters he had sent her as a Georgia congressman. Zorn, who identifies herself as an evangelical Christian, said she has looked beyond Gingrich’s multiple marriages and acknowledged infidelities, and she believes he is the most capable leader in the race. “None of us are perfect. We all have our little hang-ups,” said Zorn, of Stockbridge. “He’s my first choice. I believe he knows more than all of them put...

Gingrich: Goal is to get to Super TuesdayBy Erik Wasson - 02/05/12 11:05 AM ET GOP presidential candidate Newt Gingrich said Sunday that following his loss in the Nevada caucuses to Mitt Romney this weekend, his campaign is betting on the March 6 Super Tuesday primaries. “Our goal is to get to Super Tuesday where we are in much more favorable territory,” Gingrich said on NBC's Meet the Press. He said prospects look good in Georgia and Tennessee on that day as well as for Alabama on March 13 and Texas on April 3. “By the time Texas is over,...

Jeff Miller, Texas Gov. Rick Perry's presidential campaign chairman in California, was in Iowa with a handful of California lawmakers for last week's caucuses. He may find himself in South Carolina when the race arrives there later this month. He isn't missing much back home. "That June primary," Miller said, "might as well be 100 years away." It sure feels like it. While the Republican presidential campaigns fast-forward to New Hampshire on Tuesday and South Carolina on Jan. 21, hardly anyone in California is off the couch. Republicans here know the race may be over before they vote on June...

Hillary Clinton has blown an almost sure shot at the Democratic presidential nomination. Having surrendered the lead to Obama, she is not likely ever to regain it. It is a fantasy that the Ohio and Texas primaries will be a “firewall” to contain the flames of enthusiasm for Obama and reverse her defeats of February. Just as with Rudy Giuliani's supposed Florida firewall, Hillary's will crumble as Obama's momentum carries him forward to the nomination. Before Hillary lost her first primary or caucus, she lost the dialogue with the Obama campaign vis-a-vis the totally misguided decision to focus her message...

ALBUQUERQUE, N.M. - Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton finally won the popular vote in New Mexico's Democratic caucus and picked up one extra delegate Thursday, nine days after Super Tuesday voting ended. State Democratic Chairman Brian Colon made the announcement after a marathon hand count of 17,000 provisional ballots that had to be given to voters on Feb. 5 because of long lines and a shortage of ballots. The final statewide count gave her a 1,709-vote edge over rival Sen. Barack Obama, 73,105 or 48.8 percent of the total vote to 71,396 or 47.6 percent. The former first lady's victory in...

**EXCERPT** WHITE MARSH, Maryland (CNN) — Hillary Clinton on Monday explained away Barack Obama's clean sweep of the weekend's caucuses and primaries as a product of a caucus system that favors "activists" and, in the case of the Louisiana primary, an energized African-American community.She told reporters who had gathered to watch her tour a General Motors plant here that "everybody knew, you all knew, what the likely outcome of these recent contests were.""These are caucus states by and large, or in the case of Louisiana, you know, a very strong and very proud African-American electorate, which I totally respect and...

After picking up heavy support in the southeast but struggling in other regions on Super Tuesday, many critics wrote Mike Huckabee's campaign off as dead. With Mitt Romney now out of the race for the Republican nomination, Huckabee appears to have picked up the conservative votes that the Massachussets governor once controlled, allowing him to move in on John McCain's considerable lead. On Saturday Feb. 9, Huckabee picked up two of the three states that were up for grabs and also drew strong support in Washington state, though he appears to have lost to rival McCain. More important than the...

**EXCERPT** Left without a full slate of candidates to choose from - or assurances their votes will count in the presidential race - many Michigan Democrats felt disappointed after participating in the state's early presidential primary last month. Now, with the race between U.S. Sens. Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama still undecided, party officials in Ann Arbor are among the several groups asking for a do-over. Members of the Ann Arbor City Democratic Party were to consider a resolution supporting a 2008 presidential caucus at their regular meeting Saturday. The measure was added to their agenda Thursday amid a swell...

**EXCERPT** Super Tuesday's over and there were no absolute winners - until Mitt Romney dropped out of the race. Nonetheless, even before Romney withdrew and McCain, in effect, became his party's nominee, we might as well have canceled the rest of the primaries and caucuses, since the media had already decided that this year's standard bearers would be John McCain and Barack Obama. Yes, somewhere along the line, the role of the media has changed from reporting on the primaries to deciding the primaries. They pick their favorites, they give them preferential treatment, they tear down their opponents, and they...

Some would say that the 2008 Super Tuesday primaries and caucuses solved nothing. Others would argue that this week’s votes essentially determined who the presidential nominees will be this fall. I think the ramifications and results of Super Tuesday are somewhat inconclusive and difficult to translate, but the lessons we learned are clear. First, we now know for sure that Sen. Barack Obama can over take Sen. Hillary Clinton and win it all. In the states that favored Clinton (with the exception of Arkansas) the results were extremely close and competitive. Obama’s victories however were for the most part, decisive...

Well, Super Tuesday is over, and now we have two major party presidential nominees. That's the lead sentence I thought five weeks ago I'd be writing for this column. But the 33-day round of caucuses and primaries that seemed likely to produce decisions after 23 states voted on Super Tuesday have failed to deliver. True, John McCain appears to have a relatively clear flight path to the Republican nomination. The invaluable realclearpolitics.com Website, as I write, credits him with 697 delegates to 244 for Mitt Romney and 187 for Mike Huckabee. But the McCain aircraft can expect some turbulence before...

I'm guessing they were Mexican nationals because it was the Border Patrol that nabbed them, but I guess it's within the realm of possibilities that they were Americans making a run for the border. The ballot box was stolen from a precinct in Coachella. Coachella is heavily Republican, that's Bono country. Some Democratic true believers messing with the election? Maybe some illegals who weren't happy with Romney's opposition to McCain amnesty. Very odd. Customs & Border Patrol February 06, 2008 press release: Indio, Calif. – Last night Border Patrol agents detained four individuals in Mecca, Calif. suspected of being involved...

Hillary Clinton says more than 75,000 people have contributed to her presidential campaign since the polls closed on Super Tuesday. In a letter to supporters, Hillary wrote: “I wish I could find the words to express how grateful I am for the support you have given me. I'm sure you know by now that your support could not have come at a better moment -- I needed your help, and you responded with more enthusiasm and generosity than I could possibly have imagined. “Over the past 48 hours, you exceeded every goal we set. Since the polls closed on Super...

~EXCERPT~ Mitt Romney wanted to know how bad things really were. After six weeks of losses, culminating in Tuesday's embarrassing finish in all of the big-state contests, he gathered his inner circle Wednesday morning at the campaign's North End headquarters in Boston. Still very much the corporate fix-it man, whose methodical approach to business had made him the multimillion-dollar personal fortune he was now spending at an alarming rate, Romney had ordered up formal presentations on whether to keep fighting against a surging Sen. John McCain. One adviser assessed the communications and messaging challenges of staying in the race. Another...

~EXCERPT~ SACRAMENTO—Pressure intensified on Los Angeles County elections officials Thursday to quickly address the "double bubble" controversy over ballots given to independent voters in this week's presidential primary. Potentially at stake is the county's final delegate allocation for Democratic presidential contenders Hillary Rodham Clinton and Barack Obama, who are locked in a tight race for the party's nomination. Independent voters in California were allowed to vote in the Democratic Party or American Independent Party primaries. In Los Angeles County, independents who requested one of those ballots had to fill in an extra bubble stating which party's primary they were voting...