As Texas votes, Romney preps to cross delegate threshold Mitt Romney walks to an awaiting car after walking off of his campaign plane at McCarran International Airport on May 29, 2012 in Las Vegas. Mitt Romney stood to surpass the threshold of the 1,144 delegates he needs to clinch the Republican presidential nomination, marking the culmination of an arduous Republican primary. Romney, the former Massachusetts governor who's been regarded as the presumptive GOP nominee since his rivals ended their campaigns weeks ago, entered Tuesday's Texas primary having won 1,086 delegates, according to The Associated Press tally. With a victory in today's primary, where a total of 155 delegates are at stake, Romney was slated to secure the necessary delegates to make himself the projected Republican nominee. He won't earn the official nod until August's Republican National Convention in Tampa. "That would be good news," Romney said, with a chuckle, Tuesday morning on KRAI radio about the prospect of crossing that delegate threshold. I don't want to count the delegates before they're awarded, but I'm hopeful that our friends in Texas will give me the nod, and I'll be able to go on and become the nominee. The race for the Republican nomination has been largely over since the April 3 primary in Wisconsin. Romney's win there prompted the eventual withdrawals of his three remaining rivals: Rick Santorum, Newt Gingrich, and Ron Paul. It also hastened the onset of President Barack Obama's own re-election offensive versus Romney. Obama and Romney have begun to take a more aggressive tack against one another, but the prolonged primary season took its toll on the Republican. While conservatives appear to have rallied behind the former Massachusetts governor -- an open question, given his struggles with the heart of the GOP base during the primary season -- Romney faces additional fallout associated with the preceding stage of the campaign. Romney's been fundraising aggressively, for instance, to make up for money spent during the primary, which depleted in part his relative financial parity versus Obama. But more significantly, the Obama campaign has been turning some of the most stinging attacks on Romney from other Republicans and revived them for use in the general election. Case-in-point: the Obama campaign has spent much of the past two weeks attacking Romney's experience at Bain Capital, the private equity firm Romney had co-founded. That is a line of attack first advanced by Gingrich and Texas Gov. Rick Perry in January. Romney's continued advantage versus Obama, though, lies with an economic recovery that still rests on precarious footing. May's NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll found that half of Americans judged last month's jobs report as unsatisfactory. That dampened optimism for a recovery -- and, in turn, for Obama -- could become a potent political weapon for Romney, especially if continued economic unrest in Europe slows the pace of the recovery in the U.S.