[imgcontainer] [img:2012IllRPrimary.jpg] [source]Daily Yonder[/source] The rural, urban and exurban vote in the 2012 Illinois Republican primary. [/imgcontainer]
Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney continued to win urban counties and, as a result, took the Illinois primary yesterday.
The former Massachusetts governor won 47.2% of the vote in Illinois Tuesday. His closest rival, former Pennsylvania senator Rick Santorum, took 35.4 percent. Former House Speaker Newt Gingrich won 8 percent and Rep. Ron Paul took 9.4 percent.
Once again, however, Romney lost to Santorum in both rural and exurban counties. (Exurban counties are within metropolitan regions, but are largely rural in character.) And once again, Romney did worst in exurban counties.
The chart above shows the distribution of votes in rural, urban and exurban counties in Illinois. You can see that Romney overwhelmed Santorum in urban areas, while losing both rural and exurban counties.
(The percentages for Gingrich and Paul in rural, urban and exurban counties didn’t vary much from their statewide totals.)
As in the past several races, Santorum’s margin in exurban counties was larger than in rural. Santorum’s advantage over Romney in rural counties was 2.1 percentage points.
In Illinois, however, 69.4 percent of all the votes came from metro counties. Santorum would have needed to win more than 80 percent of the total rural and exurban vote just to overcome Romney’s advantage in urban Illinois.
Santorum, however, continued to say that the vote totals showed him to be the candidate of true Republican voters, affirming that he’s not ready to concede the race.
“We won the areas that conservatives and Republicans populate,” Mr. Santorum told an overflow crowd in Gettysburg, Pennsylvania. “We’ve got five weeks until a big win and a big delegate sweep in Pennsylvania. We must go out and fight this fight.”
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