Rick Santorum Meets With Conservative Leaders A group of conservative leaders met with Rick Santorum on Thursday to consider various strategies to help his faltering campaign for the Republican presidential nomination, including some discussion of how to persuade Newt Gingrich to drop out of the contest. "The conservative leaders are going to ratchet up calls for Newt Gingrich, who has slipped to fourth place, to coalesce behind Rick," said Hogan Gidley, Mr. Santorum's spokesman. Mr. Gidley added that he did not expect Mr. Gingrich to drop out, and later in the afternoon, advisers to Mr. Gingrich confirmed that he had no intention of doing so, since the meeting generated no fresh arguments. "It's a no-impact meeting," one said. It's a joke. While Mr. Gingrich's continued presence in the race was lamented, it is actually Mr. Santorum who is facing the most pressure from Republican leaders to withdraw. That chatter intensified after Tuesday, when Mitt Romney swept the District of Columbia, Maryland and Wisconsin. It seems almost impossible mathematically for Mr. Santorum to overtake Mr. Romney's commanding lead in the delegate count, given the states that have yet to vote. So while discussion of Mr. Gingrich's dropping out would be a welcome change to the Santorum camp, much of the political world has already moved on from seeing Mr. Gingrich as a factor in the race and is talking now about whether Mr. Santorum can even hold his home state, Pennsylvania, which votes on April 24. But the Santorum camp is convinced that had Mr. Gingrich left the race, they might have won some big states. And their concern about him has taken on new urgency with the possibility that if the vote in Pennsylvania is close, Mr. Gingrich could siphon off just enough support to cost Mr. Santorum the state. Losing Pennsylvania would be devastating for Mr. Santorum, who lost in the state in 2006 by more than 17 percentage points when he sought re-election to a third term in the Senate. He has said he must win the presidential primary there and has predicted he will, though some polls show the race tightening. "I don't think there's any doubt in anybody's mind that if Newt were out of the race, we'd be crushing Romney," Mr. Gidley said. That is difficult to prove. Polls have suggested that the second choice of many Gingrich voters would not be Mr. Santorum, but Mr. Romney. And lately, Mr. Gingrich has drawn smaller and smaller percentages of the vote, making him less of a factor. "There's no clean, linear way to say Newt's voters will jump over to Santorum," said a senior Gingrich adviser, speaking on condition of anonymity. Rick has had his one-on-one shot with Mitt for weeks now, and he didn't close the deal in Wisconsin, Michigan, Ohio or Illinois. Mr. Santorum called several weeks ago for Mr. Gingrich to get out - and Mr. Gingrich had earlier called for Mr. Santorum to withdraw. But lately, the two have barely mentioned each other publicly. A Gingrich adviser said they had had cordial conversations privately lately and even put their heads together about how to block Mr. Romney from clinching the nomination. Thursday's meeting was attended by about eight conservative leaders who got together in Northern Virginia with Mr. Santorum and his top aides. Gary Bauer, president of American Values and a strong backer of Mr. Santorum's, said the meeting was a strategy session "on how to get Senator Santorum successfully to the goal, which is the nomination." Attendees included representatives from conservative coalitions, Christian groups, social conservatives, backers of the Tea Party movement and fiscal conservative groups, said a person with knowledge of the meeting. Richard Viguerie, a direct-mail expert, who helped organize the meeting, said: "We identified some things that are working and some things that aren't. We need to make a midcourse correction," mainly to change the notion that the race is over. He said that he hoped Mr. Gingrich would drop out but that he was not the focus of the meeting and no one was relying on that as a strategy. "We've got to play our own game," he said. One person present - who said that revealing the details of a strategy meeting would mean no invitation next time - said no one indicated any decision to back off from Mr. Santorum. Much larger groups of conservative and religious leaders have met before in an attempt to coalesce around a conservative candidate, gathering in Texas in January, for example, in advance of the South Carolina primary. A majority there voted to activate their networks on Mr. Santorum's behalf. But that effort was seen as too little too late, and Mr. Gingrich, who retained the support of some of the conservative leaders, won South Carolina. More than 200 conservative leaders met again in Texas in March to plot strategy on Mr. Santorum's behalf, and they raised almost $1.8 million for his campaign and his "super PAC."