Santorum Projected Winner in Alabama March 13, 2011 - ABC projected Rick Santorum would win the Albama primary, one of two high-stakes Southern contests today. Results in Mississipi remained too close to call with Santorum, Mitt Romney and Newt Gingrich locked in a three-way race there. Santorum's victory in Alabama came after a week of polls that showed the three challengers running virtually neck-and-neck in both the southern states. With more than half of precincts reporting, Santorum had a 4 percentage point lead over Gingrich, 34-30. Romney was in third at 28 percent. The Alabama win will provide a boost to Santorum even though he will still be well behind in the race for delegates. Before polls closed today, Romney said Santorum was "at the desperate end" of his campaign -- a prediction that may prove premature after today's results. The large proportion of evangelical Christian voters was not fertile ground for Romney, but the former Massachusetts governor put together a strong organization, particularly in Mississippi. According to an ABC News analysis of exit poll results in Alabama, strongly conservative voters gravitated toward Santorum and Gingrich -- together the two candidates claimed nearly eight in 10 of them. However, in Mississippi, evangelical voters, not typically Romney's strong suit, were trending in his direction -- 32 percent of members of that group supported him. Four in 10 voters said electability was their most important criteria when choosing a candidate at the ballot box on Tuesday, which was helping Romney's margin. "In both states about half name Romney as the candidate most likely win in November," according to ABC News pollster Gary Langer. That leaves fewer than a quarter in both states who pick either Santorum or Gingrich on electability. It may matter: Four in 10 voters call electability the most important candidate attribute in their vote. All three candidates swept through the two Southern strongholds in recent days with Romney declaring his love for "cheesy grits" and the term "y'all." He was aided in his quest to win the Mississippi primary by a political organization helmed by two members of former Mississippi Gov. Haley Barbour's family. Barbour's nephews, Henry and Austin, led a team of field organizers and advisers that ran Romney's ground game there. On his campaign plane in Missouri today, Romney said the primaries were "all about getting delegates." "If the polls are anywhere near correct, we'll end up with, I don't know, a third of the delegates," he told reporters aboard a flight from St. Louis to Kansas City. And if that's the case, why that inches us closer to that magic number. Romney and his campaign have been increasingly casting the race as a battle for delegates -- and one that only he can win -- while Santorum and Gingrich are insisting that they both have the chance to deny Romney the delegate total needed to clinch the Republican nomination. The former Massachusetts governor and his allies outspent Gingrich and Santorum in the two states on the television airwaves. Though the Romney campaign spent modestly on television ads, a pro-Romney super PAC, Restore Our Future, kicked in more than $1 million in Alabama and nearly that much in Mississippi. In both states, that level of spending outpaced Santorum, Gingrich and the super PACs supporting them by more than double. Alabama and Mississippi were not the only states holding nominating contests on Tuesday night. Hawaii was also holding caucuses, but final results will not be available until early Wednesday morning and American Samoa was also finalizing the results of its caucuses.