On Saturday, Santorum won support from a group of national leaders of the religious right who had been meeting at a ranch in Texas to see whether they could unite around a consensus champion to stop Romney.
The vote is a strong symbolic boost for Santorum at a time when several polls show him slipping behind Gingrich in South Carolina. It remained unclear, however, whether some of the groups represented there, such as James Dobson's Focus on the Family, would invest much in TV, radio, and in direct mail touting the former Pennsylvania senator - or whether such a blitz could break through the heavy volume of ads already flying here.
Evangelicals in South Carolina are divided as they are elsewhere; Gingrich and Santorum lead among those voters, but Romney also is getting his share, recent polls show.
The Rev. Robert Jeffress, pastor of the First Baptist Church in Dallas, did not attend what he called the "waste of time" summit. He was not convinced that pastors' endorsements make much difference to the people in the pews, and he said stopping Romney would be difficult in any case.
"The real division is between the idealists who are looking for the right president, anybody but Romney, and the pragmatists who don't want to cut off their access to the next president, who they think will be Romney," Jeffress said Friday in an interview. "The fat lady is not singing, but she's in the green room, warming up."
South Carolina is seen as perhaps the last, best chance to stop Romney, who swept the New Hampshire primary Tuesday after narrowly winning Iowa's caucuses Jan. 3.
