The Atlanta Journal-Constitution 
 
 Tuesday was meant to be Newt Gingrich’s moment, in which after a fallow February his presidential campaign could rebound by showing strength in the Republican Party’s Southern core. 
 
 But by claiming only a single victory in the state he once represented in Congress, Gingrich's viability -- even as a regional candidate -- is in doubt. 
 
 Gingrich took a blowout win in Georgia, called by television networks as polls closed to a round of cheers in a Cobb County hotel ballroom, but it would be his only Super Tuesday triumph: Pennsylvania Sen. Rick Santorum bested Gingrich in Tennessee and Oklahoma, where Gingrich had attempted to compete. 
 
 In a race of unpredictable swings, Gingrich has vowed since his humbling in Florida that he would rise again. His path remains difficult, but the former U.S. House speaker's team insists a South-heavy primary schedule in the coming weeks gives him the opportunity for momentum. 
 
 Amid persistent questions, Gingrich has felt the need to prove that he is remaining in the race beyond Tuesday, and his campaign took the unusual step of releasing a schedule a week in advance showing trips to Alabama and Mississippi -- both of which vote March 13 -- and Kansas, which holds its caucuses Saturday. 
 
 He also paid a visit to Huntsville, Ala., Tuesday afternoon, before flying back for his Cobb County rally. 
 
 “With your help and a win next week we could really be in a totally new race, and I’m very excited about it,” he told several hundred supporters in the U.S. Space and Rocket Center in Huntsville, a speech that focused on Gingrich's plans to revive the space program. 
 
 Gingrich returns to Alabama today for a three-stop swing from Montgomery to Birmingham, where he will be for the first time accompanied by the Secret Service. 
 
 Former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney and Santorum already have Secret Service details, a service reserved for "major candidates." 
 
 Romney remains the clear leader in Republican convention delegates after Super Tuesday, while Santorum and Gingrich continue to fight to be the champion of the party's right flank. When Gingrich earned his first win in South Carolina and was riding high in the polls, he strongly hinted that Santorum should drop out. Now the tables are turned, as Santorum picked up some wins and momentum in February. 
 
 Analysts said Gingrich's win in Georgia does little to alter that trend. 
 
 “He has huge problems," said Merle Black, an Emory University political scientist. "He can probably campaign successfully in Alabama and Mississippi, but that is a Deep South strategy. And he really needs a broader strategy than that.” 
 
 Brookings Institute scholar Bill Galston concluded, "I don’t see him with any realistic shot of winning the nomination at this point." 
 
 Gingrich staffers insist that there is a path to the nomination, and have stressed how the nomination race remains in its early stages. Two new factors are in play this year that could lengthen it considerably. 
 
 The first is proportional allocation of delegates, a change for the Republican Party in the 2012 cycle allowing different campaigns to pick up delegates even while one is on a winning streak. The second is the rise of Super PACs, which can take in and spend unlimited sums on behalf of -- but not in coordination with -- campaigns. 
 
 One big donor, in Gingrich's case Nevada billionaire Sheldon Adelson, can prop up a candidate. Adelson has given the pro-Gingrich Winning Our Future Super PAC well more than $10 million. The group has produced pro-Gingrich advertising nationally and in key states. 
 
 "As long as he has the Adelsons and others funding him, why would he drop out?" said University of Virginia political scientist Larry Sabato. 
 
 Gingrich spokesman R.C. Hammond pointed out that Gingrich has done well in the states where he has not been massively outspent by the pro-Romney forces, and that Romney and Santorum will be exposed as insincere conservatives in the stretch of the country running from western South Carolina to West Texas. 
 
 "Every primary that’s here forward is a fair shot for us," Hammond said. "You can't fake being conservative in those states." 
 
 Lingering at the Gingrich primary night party Tuesday night, Rick Tyler, a former Gingrich aide helping run the Winning Our Future Super PAC, said the group is airing advertisements in Kansas, Alabama and Mississippi and predicted Gingrich victories in the latter two states. The group was advertising in Tennessee, too, but Tyler said the state "just didn't come together." 
 
 Gingrich's history in the party, Tyler predicted, would buoy him in the South. 
 
 "The whole South turned Republican under Speaker Gingrich," he said. "They won't forget that." 
 
 Tuesday night Gingrich noted that the location, Cobb County's Waverly Hotel, was the same place he spent Election Night 1994. That night's result represents the most prominent line on his resume: Architect of the historic Republican takeover of the U.S. House that made him speaker. 
 
 Gingrich's 1-for-10 night was hardly the same tidal wave, but he did his best to revel in the Georgia win. 
 
 "It's more than a chapter in the race for the nomination," Gingrich said. "It's a chapter in the fight for the soul of the Republican Party. " 
 
 Jeremy Redmon contributed. ||||| ATLANTA — With a decisive victory in Georgia, Newt Gingrich saved a campaign that seemed teetering on the precipice of disaster two weeks ago. Polling then suggested that he might achieve no better than a squeaker victory in his home state, an embarrassment that could have led him to withdraw. 
 
 But after a single-minded focus on barnstorming around Georgia leading up to the Super Tuesday contests, Mr. Gingrich is poised to gain a substantial share of the state’s 76 delegates to the Republican convention. 
 
 “In the morning, we are going on to Alabama,” Mr. Gingrich told an enthusiastic crowd here on Tuesday night, some waving “Newt-a-Mania” signs. “We’re going on to Mississippi. We’re going on to Kansas. And that’s just this week.” 
 
 Alabama and Mississippi, which hold the next primaries on the calendar next Tuesday, both figure into Mr. Gingrich’s grand strategy for reanimating his candidacy by carrying Super Tuesday momentum into other victories in the South. So does Kansas, which holds its caucuses on Saturday. 
 
 But Mr. Gingrich failed to gain a strong enough finish in Tennessee and Oklahoma to displace Rick Santorum as the leading alternative to Mitt Romney. 
 
 In Oklahoma, Mr. Santorum won a commanding victory, with Mr. Romney second and Mr. Gingrich third. 
 
 In Tennessee, where Mr. Gingrich seemed to have closed some of the gap with Mr. Santorum in recent days, he was on his way to a disappointing third-place finish, exit polling showed. 
 
 Mr. Gingrich lumped Mr. Santorum with all the other candidates who had surged earlier in the campaign only to drop out: Tim Pawlenty, Michele Bachmann, Rick Perry and Herman Cain. 
 
 “And now it’s Santorum,” Mr. Gingrich said on Tuesday night. “There’s lots of bunny rabbits that run through. I’m the tortoise.” 
 
 As Mr. Gingrich visits Alabama and Mississippi in the next two days, he will be shadowed by Mr. Santorum, who is turning his own sights to the Deep South. 
 
 Mr. Gingrich was feeling confident enough of his Georgia victory on Tuesday to risk another round of “Newt Skywalker” jokes by detouring to the U.S. Space and Rocket Center in Huntsville, Ala. 
 
 But once out of Georgia, he will not be able to count on the “native son” sentiment that fueled no small part of his win. 
 
 According to exit polls, more than a third of Georgia voters said Mr. Gingrich’s ties to the state, which he represented in the House for two decades, were important in their choice of candidate. Four out of five voters said the rise in gas prices (up 6 percent in the state in the past month) was an important factor in their choice. 
 
 Mr. Gingrich has focused intensely on energy in the past few weeks, promising to lower the price of gasoline to $2.50 a gallon by aggressive drilling. Many energy economists said the claim was simplistic, and Mr. Romney called it “pandering.” 
 
 Much of Mr. Gingrich’s speech on Tuesday night was spent on a recitation of how “Wall Street” money, meaning Mr. Romney’s wealthy supporters, had been dedicated to undermining his earlier surges with negative advertising. 
 
 “I hope the analysts in Washington and New York, who spent June and July explaining our campaign was dead, will watch this tonight and learn a little bit from this crowd and from this place,” he said. 
 
 Merle Black, a political scientist at Emory University in Atlanta, said Mr. Gingrich had most likely also won support by attacking a favorite target, the “elite” news media, which he took to task for creating a controversy over Rush Limbaugh’s verbal attacks against an advocate for contraception. 
 
 Mr. Gingrich repeated the criticism on Tuesday, calling the issue over Mr. Limbaugh “the last desperate effort of the elite media to smother an uprising by diverting us into any possible fight.” 
 
 Mr. Black said Mr. Gingrich could win all 14 of Georgia’s Congressional districts, giving him a vast majority of the state’s delegates. 
 
 “It’s certainly a surprise from what he looked like a couple of weeks ago,” Mr. Black said. 
 
 But even if Mr. Gingrich went on to win the states in play next week, his path to the nomination remains improbable. 
 
 “He’s got to win something outside the South,” Mr. Black said. “Where’s he going to go? Where’s he going to show strength?”
– Newt Gingrich has received a much-needed boost from a big win in his home state—although without even a second-place finish elsewhere, the road ahead looks uncertain. Gingrich took 47% of the vote in Georgia to Mitt Romney's 26%, and Rick Santorum's 20%. More than a third of voters in the state Gingrich represented in the House for two decades said that his ties to Georgia influenced their choice, the New York Times notes. Alabama and Mississippi vote next Tuesday, and Gingrich aides expect him to do well there, although Santorum won both Tennessee and Oklahoma on Super Tuesday, with Romney coming in second. With the pro-Gingrich Winning Our Future super PAC still awash with Nevada billionaire Sheldon Adelson's cash, Gingrich is unlikely to drop out soon. But "he’s got to win something outside the South,” an Emory University political scientist tells the Atlanta Journal-Constitution. “Where’s he going to go? Where’s he going to show strength?”