White House hopeful Mitt Romney, struggling to sell his conservative credentials to a wary Republican base, looked to right his faltering campaign with a victory Saturday in the Maine caucuses after a trio of stinging defeats.
The frontrunner had largely ignored Maine to focus on other contests, but on Friday he announced an 11th-hour trip to the northeasternmost US state, where he finds himself in a showdown with Texas congressman Ron Paul.
Romney\'s goal is simple: avoid a fourth straight election setback, which would only deepen Republican concern about his inability to seal the deal in the race to be party standard-bearer against President Barack Obama in the November 6 election.
The party will announce a winner Saturday evening, and officials predict it will come down to the wire.
"What will happen is that either Paul or Romney will win by 200 votes, in my opinion, one way or the other," Maine Republican Party chairman Charlie Webster told Maine Today Media.
The other two candidates, former House speaker Newt Gingrich and religious conservative Rick Santorum, who surged to the fore with victories earlier this week in Minnesota, Missouri and Colorado, have not actively competed in Maine.
Candidates have not poured the resources -- such as funding for negative ads -- into Maine like they did in previous contests in South Carolina, Florida and Nevada.
Maine\'s weeklong series of caucuses is non-binding -- the state\'s delegates to the Republican National Convention will be decided later -- but its timing is key, as the results will likely reverberate in the political echo chamber for weeks, with the next contests in the race taking place February 28 in Arizona and Michigan.
Paul is currently in fourth place in the nationwide race, and experts give him little hope of winning either the Republican nomination or the election. But his feisty campaign has gained traction among young voters, and a victory in Maine would provide a substantial boost.
Should Romney lose to Paul, a Libertarian-leaning champion of small government and reduced foreign aid and military action, it would signal a worrying setback for Romney, a former governor of nearby Massachusetts, in his own backyard.
Romney has won three early victories in state primaries and caucuses and leads in the all-important delegates count, but his nomination is not a foregone conclusion.
Romney spent Friday in Washington courting the party\'s core faithful at the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC), where delegates are voting in a closely-watched straw poll whose results will be announced later Saturday.
At CPAC Romney told a crowd of thousands he had been a "severely conservative governor" and framed the upcoming election as "a battle for the soul of America."
But conservative pundits have seized on swirling doubts about the man put forward by the Republican establishment as the most capable of beating Obama.
"The Republican Party has decided, instead of finding a new guy, to do what it can to get Romney across the finish line no matter how bad the limp," the conservative news blog RedState.com wrote on its website.
Television images from Portland on Saturday showed Romney hugging and glad-handing supporters at a school gymnasium, where he took swipes at Obama.
"I want to restore to America the principles that made this nation who we are," he said. "I believe I\'m the one person in this race who actually can beat the president."
Romney, however, has been accused of being a flip-flopper on the key issue of abortion and the multimillionaire businessman has been attacked by campaign rivals for being out of touch with the average American.
But he refused to shy away from his wealth on Friday, telling CPAC: "I\'m not ashamed to say I was successful."
Later that night in Portland, Maine he faced a rowdy crowd at a town hall meeting, where he fielded needling questions about his off-shore bank accounts and his recent controversial comments about the poor.
"I\'ve got to take some shots now and then or it wouldn\'t be interesting," Romney said when asked about investments in the Cayman Islands, according to Fox News.
"I pay all the taxes I\'m required to pay under the law -- by the way, not a dollar more."
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