Mitt Romney will win all five Republican presidential primaries Tuesday night, completing a sweep of contests in New York, Connecticut, Rhode Island, Pennsylvania and Delaware. Romney boasted more than 50 percent of the vote in all five states, according to early returns. In Connecticut, with 90 percent of the expected votes in, Romney led Ron Paul 67 percent to 13 percent. In Rhode Island, with most of the expected votes counted, Romney led Paul 63 percent to 24 percent.
In
Pennsylvania, with nearly all of the votes in, Romney had 56 percent.
Rick Santorum, who dropped out of the Republican presidential contest
earlier this month, followed with 20 percent of the vote.
In Delaware, with most of the votes counted, Romney led Newt Gingrich 56 percent to 27 percent. And in New York, with 51 percent of the expected votes in, Romney led Paul 60 percent to 17 percent.
Romney is likely to add more than 200 delegates to the 692 estimated delegates he had already secured before the evening's five contests.
Romney
will still lack the 1,144 delegates necessary to formally clinch the
Republican nomination after Tuesday -- but the former Massachusetts
governor is clearly claiming the mantle of presumptive Republican
nominee. Even as he continues to put in the requisite work toward
officially sealing up the Republican nomination, he pivoted to the
general election in a speech Tuesday night in New Hampshire.
Speaking
to supporters, the presumptive GOP nominee focused his attention solely
on President Obama. Romney did not mention either of this remaining
Republican rivals by name, instead casting himself as an improvement
over the current president and promising "the start of a new and better
chapter."
"A better America begins tonight," Romney told the
enthusiastic crowd. "Tonight is the start of a new campaign to unite
every American who knows in their heart that we can do better. The last
few years have been the best that Barack Obama can do. But it's not the
best America can do. Tonight is the beginning of the end of the
disappointments of the Obama years."
The Obama
campaign immediately hit back against the Romney camp, arguing in a
statement that Romney's speech "should have been Back to the Future,
because he has proposed a return to the same policies that got us into
the economic crisis in the first place."
"Mitt Romney has spent the past year out on the campaign
trail tearing down the President with a negative message that even
Republicans who have endorsed him have criticized," Obama for America
Press Secretary Ben LaBolt said in the statement. "This marks the end
of that monologue. Now he must put his record and his agenda next to
the President's."
Despite what increasingly looks like Romney's inevitable success in
securing the Republican nomination, Newt Gingrich on Tuesday vowed to
continue campaigning in North Carolina. He indicated , however, that he
plans to reevaluate his run in the wake of his losses, and said Tuesday
his campaign would in the coming days "look realistically where we're
at."
The former speaker, who has only won two
nominating contests, was counting on a strong performance in Delaware
Tuesday to get a "bounce" that might prompt donors to take another look
at his candidacy. He has vowed to stay in the race until the Republican
presidential convention in Tampa this summer, but his presidential
campaign is more than $4 million in debt and the pace of its
fundraising has fallen significantly behind its spending, according to
figures released by the campaign Friday evening.
Gingrich suggested that if Romney does clinch the nomination, he will support his candidacy.
"If
he does end up as the nominee, I think every conservative in this
country has to be committed to defeating Barack Obama," Gingrich said.
In
an appearance on CNN Tuesday night, Santorum declined to explicitly
endorse Romney, but said that "If he's the nominee, I'm going to do
everything I can to make sure he defeats Barack Obama."