As Mitt Romney looks to bolster his frontrunner status in the race for the Republican presidential nomination on Super Tuesday, all eyes are on the Ohio primary.
In the Buckeye State race, 63 delegates are at stake, with an additional three unbound by the contest.
The Polls
HuffPost's Mark Blumenthal reports on the latest polls out on the Ohio primary:
Two final polls from CNN and Time in Ohio and Georgia provide political junkies with more to chew on, but largely confirming what other surveys have been telling us: Ohio remains a very close contest between Mitt Romney and Rick Santorum, while Newt Gingrich appears poised to win his home state of Georgia by a wide margin.
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In Ohio, the new CNN/Time poll shows Romney and Santorum tied at 32 percent each, followed by Gingrich at 14 percent and Ron Paul at 11 percent. That margin is nearly the same as the estimate produced by the HuffPost Pollster chart for Ohio, based on all available public polls, including 11 completed in the past week. The chart shows Santorum ahead of Romney by just a tenth of a percentage point (32.6 percent to 32.5 percent) -- in other words, the race is as close as it gets, well within the statistical and real-world margin of error for primary election polling. Newt Gingrich (15.7 percent) and Ron Paul (11.9 percent) run a distant third and fourth place.
Attack Of The Super PACs
HuffPost's Paul Blumenthal reports:
Yet again, Romney hopes to knock off his opponents with a little help from his friends. Restore Our Future, the unlimited-money super PAC run by former Romney campaign aides, is back again with $6.7 million in spending, spread predominantly across four key states voting on Tuesday: Georgia, Ohio, Oklahoma and Tennessee.
In total, independent groups, which are supposedly unaffiliated with the campaigns, have spent $11.9 million across the Super Tuesday states, according to records held by the Federal Election Commission. Most of that money has gone towards television and radio ads that are almost entirely negative.
Those negative ads have largely zeroed in on former Pennsylvania Sen. Rick Santorum, who, despite running a shoestring campaign, has emerged as the most serious threat to Romney's grip on the nomination. Forty-two percent of all the Super Tuesday super PAC spending comes in the form of attacks on Santorum.
Check out the slideshow below for more on the Romney campaign.
