Republican US presidential nomination front-runner Mitt Romney grabbed back some momentum after midweek losses in three states, scoring a narrow win in Maine’s caucuses on Saturday, hours after winning a straw poll of Republican conservative activists.
Results of Maine’s non-binding straw poll showed the former Massachusetts governor with 39 percent support, or 2,190 votes, ahead of libertarian US Representative Ron Paul with 36 percent or 1,996 votes.
Former US senator Rick Santorum and former US House of Representatives speaker Newt Gingrich, who did not campaign in Maine, won 18 percent and 6 percent of the vote, respectively.
Despite anecdotal signs of higher voter turnout, the votes cast in Maine were only slightly above 2008 levels. A handful of communities have yet to hold their caucuses.
The Maine outcome capped a good day for Romney, who unexpectedly lost to Santorum, a social conservative, in Missouri, Minnesota and Colorado on Tuesday to generate new doubts about his appeal to party conservatives.
Republicans are seeking a nominee to challenge Democratic US President Barack Obama in the Nov. 6 general election. Twenty-one delegates will be allocated from Maine. A candidate needs 1,144 delegates to clinch the Republican nomination.
Romney earlier on Saturday won a closely watched straw poll at the Conservative Political Action Conference in Washington, with 38 percent support to -Santorum’s 31 percent.
More moderate than his rivals, Romney, a former venture capitalist, has struggled to convince conservatives he is one of them.
He spoke to CPAC on Friday and called himself “severely conservative.”
“I’m committed to turning around America. And I’m heartened to have the support of so many good people in this great state,” Romney said in a statement after the Maine results.
Romney also staked a claim as a Washington outsider “who has never served a day in our broken federal government.”
“The voters of Maine have sent a clear message that it is past time to send an outsider to the White House, a conservative with a lifetime of experience in the private sector, who can uproot -Washington’s culture of taxing and spending and borrowing and endless bureaucracy,” he said.
In his failed presidential run in 2008, Romney won the Maine caucuses with 2,837 votes, or 52 percent backing.
In a sign of how seriously the Romney campaign took the potential for a fourth consecutive state loss, Romney flew to Portland on Friday for a town hall meeting, and spoke at two of the state’s largest caucus sites on Saturday.
He also brought some of his top surrogates, including son Tagg and former New Hampshire governor John Sununu to Maine to speak on his behalf, emphasizing his long career in the private sector.
Sensing a possible victory, Paul hosted a party in Portland on Saturday evening.
After the results were announced, he told supporters that Romney’s margin of victory was so small, “it’s almost like we could call it a tie.”
Paul also forecast that when Maine’s delegates were finally assigned, “we will control the Maine caucus when we go to Tampa” for the Republican convention in August.
The northeastern state of Maine encompasses everything from oceanfront estates such as that owned by former US president George H.W. Bush in Kennebunkport, to remote potato farms near the state’s northern border with Canada.
A fire caused by a burst gas pipe yesterday spread to several homes and sent a fireball soaring into the sky outside Malaysia’s largest city, injuring more than 100 people. The towering inferno near a gas station in Putra Heights outside Kuala Lumpur was visible for kilometers and lasted for several hours. It happened during a public holiday as Muslims, who are the majority in Malaysia, celebrate the second day of Eid al-Fitr. National oil company Petronas said the fire started at one of its gas pipelines at 8:10am and the affected pipeline was later isolated. Disaster management officials said shutting the
US Vice President J.D. Vance on Friday accused Denmark of not having done enough to protect Greenland, when he visited the strategically placed and resource-rich Danish territory coveted by US President Donald Trump. Vance made his comment during a trip to the Pituffik Space Base in northwestern Greenland, a visit viewed by Copenhagen and Nuuk as a provocation. “Our message to Denmark is very simple: You have not done a good job by the people of Greenland,” Vance told a news conference. “You have under-invested in the people of Greenland, and you have under-invested in the security architecture of this
UNREST: The authorities in Turkey arrested 13 Turkish journalists in five days, deported a BBC correspondent and on Thursday arrested a reporter from Sweden Waving flags and chanting slogans, many hundreds of thousands of anti-government demonstrators on Saturday rallied in Istanbul, Turkey, in defence of democracy after the arrest of Istanbul Mayor Ekrem Imamoglu which sparked Turkey’s worst street unrest in more than a decade. Under a cloudless blue sky, vast crowds gathered in Maltepe on the Asian side of Turkey’s biggest city on the eve of the Eid al-Fitr celebration which started yesterday, marking the end of Ramadan. Ozgur Ozel, chairman of the main opposition Republican People’s Party (CHP), which organized the rally, said there were 2.2 million people in the crowd, but
JOINT EFFORTS: The three countries have been strengthening an alliance and pressing efforts to bolster deterrence against Beijing’s assertiveness in the South China Sea The US, Japan and the Philippines on Friday staged joint naval drills to boost crisis readiness off a disputed South China Sea shoal as a Chinese military ship kept watch from a distance. The Chinese frigate attempted to get closer to the waters, where the warships and aircraft from the three allied countries were undertaking maneuvers off the Scarborough Shoal — also known as Huangyan Island (黃岩島) and claimed by Taiwan and China — in an unsettling moment but it was warned by a Philippine frigate by radio and kept away. “There was a time when they attempted to maneuver
RSS