Gloom and Broom - NYTimes.com A few quick thoughts on the morning after Rick Santorum's southern "sweep," as I've seen it called: He won two states. Two. If this is sweeping, we're talking about a tiny broom. It's nonetheless a tiny broom inflicting a big headache on Mitt Romney. The narrative continues: he can't woo the staunchest conservatives. He can't "seal the deal." Despite greater resources. Despite more lavish spending. Despite the "aura of inevitability," which is, at this point, one sorry, underperforming aura. If he gets the nomination, he'll do so only by the dictates of delegate arithmetic, not with the momentum of voter passion. It's coming down to a tedious numbers game, and for Romney we need to tweak that old saw about campaigning in poetry and governing in prose. He's campaigning in algebra. Part of his trouble with the Alabama and Mississippi results concerns the talk over the day or two before. Looking at polls, some writers and commentators began wondering if Romney might actually win two states that weren't previously seen as the kinds of places where he should do well. And so his third-place finishes look worse, through the prism of last-minute and late-blooming expectations, than they really are. If you edit those expectations out of the picture, you're left with an outcome that doesn't shed any radically new light on the mindsets of Republican primary voters. They've long considered Romney the moderate in the field, and they still do. Mississippi and Alabama aren't going to be as warm to moderates as, say, Florida was. In Michael Allen's morning Playbook in Politico yesterday, under the witty subhead "pundit prep," he showcased some statistics about Republican primary voters in the two states from Public Policy Polling: Asked if they think Barack Obama is a Christian or a Muslim, 14 percent of likely primary voters in Alabama said Christian, while 45 percent said Muslim. In Mississippi, 12 percent said Christian, while 52 percent said Muslim. Asked if they believe in evolution, 26 percent of respondents in Alabama said yes, while 60 percent said no. In Mississippi, 22 percent said yes, while 66 percent said no. I'll leave you on that unsettling note.