2012 Decoded

Rick Santorum "won big" in Kansas on Saturday as the newspaper headlines today suggest, but the contest for the Republican primary is now all about delegate math, and in that arena, Santorum is still losing, and losing big.

In a sense, the former U.S. senator from Pennsylvania did little more than run in place as a result of yesterday's voting. While Santorum won Kansas with 51 percent of the vote and likely picked up 32 of 40 delegates at stake there, Mitt Romney was quietly tallying up a slightly greater number of delegates - an estimated 38 - in little noticed contests in Wyoming and the territories of Guam, the U.S. Virgin Islands and the Northern Mariana Islands.

 At the end of the day, Romney was still outpacing his nearest rival by better than 2-to-1 in total delegates, with the front-runner at 454 and Santorum at 217. (Former House Speaker Newt Gingrich was way behind at 107, and Rep. Ron Paul of Texas was way, way behind at 47.) That means that at this point in the season, Romney has racked up 39.6 percent of the necessary 1,144 delegates to claim the nomination, while Santorum has just 19 percent.