Santorum Wins Alabama, Mississippi - NYTimes.com Rick Santorum certainly earned his victories last night in Alabama and Mississippi. The base of the Republican Party, particularly as it is represented in these primaries, is far to the right politically, angry and driven by an intolerant brand of evangelical Christianity. Mr. Santorum has shown that he best captures that extremism and that anger. And, unlike Mitt Romney, who many conservative Republicans still think is faking it, Mr. Santorum speaks from the heart - about the economy, about social issues, and about conservatism as it is now defined in the G.O.P. In Mobile last week, Mr. Santorum stirred up fears that we're in the midst of fighting an apocalyptic holy war with Islam, and suggested that the president is ill-equipped to lead the way. He said Mr. Obama has "swept clean all references to religion when referring to the enemy. He won't say that it is radical Islam...Well, we may not be at war against them, but let me tell you, they are at war against us. He also went on an anti-science tear, characterizing environmentalism as "an ideology that puts humans not as stewards of the Earth but as servants of the Earth." He sneered: "This administration officially labeled carbon dioxide as a toxin. Tell that to a plant! Tell that to all of us who exhale CO2 with every breath. According to Obama we're all polluters by breathing. Obama sees us all as points of pollution instead of points of potential human beings. The subtext, I guess, is that any attempt to mitigate the effects of global warming is, in reality, part of a vast left-wing conspiracy to strip the American people of their liberty. That sort of thing works really well in the deeply conservative Deep South. Exit polls in both Mississippi and Alabama showed that Mr. Santorum led by substantial margins among voters who said they were very conservative (42 percent of the voters in Mississippi and 36 percent in Alabama), among voters who said they were evangelical Christians (83 percent and 80 percent), and among those who said it's important for the candidate to share their religious views. There is nothing typical about the voting population in these primaries. The voters in Mississippi and Alabama were almost entirely white (over 90 percent in each state). They are far more heavily anti-abortion than the country at large, and pro-Tea Party. Working women voted in small numbers. That is a problem for Mr. Santorum going forward. He is not going to find such voters in large concentrations in California, or New York or many other states with a large number of delegates. It's hard to see how Mr. Santorum can win, but he came back from nowhere to turn the contest into, effectively, a two-man race, and he's helped show his party what its base really wants.