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Romney has won 18 of the 30 states that have held nominating contests, plus the District. He now seems poised for a string of victories, as moderate states across the Northeast hold primaries later this month. Santorum’s best hope for an April win looks to be his home state of Pennsylvania, where recent polls have shown Romney trailing behind him–but gaining fast.

Speaking to supporters in Mars, Pa., Santorum said he would continue in the race–looking ahead to the primary in his home state on April 24. “Pennsylvania and half the other people in this country have yet to be heard. And we’re going to go out and campaign across this nation to make sure their voices are heard.”

Santorum made a familiar pitch: that Romney is too moderate to succeed as a Republican nominee, saying it was a tactic the party had tried against previous Democratic incumbents. It never worked, he said.

“We don’t win by moving to the middle,” Santorum said. “We win by getting people in the middle to move to us.”

Exit polls show that Tuesday’s contests drew a broader slice of the Republican electorate–making a contrast with earlier primaries in states dominated by very conservative voters.

For instance, fewer than four in 10 Republican voters in Wisconsin and Maryland identify as evangelical Christians in preliminary exit poll results. That’s far below the average across all contests this year, which was 51 percent evangelical voters.

And in Wisconsin’s open primary, an unusual number of Democrats and independent voters appeared to be voting in the GOP contest.

In 2008, self-identified Republicans made up 73 percent of voters in the Republican primary. But this year, early exit polls showed the number was roughly six in 10. In the early exit poll data, about three in 10 voters identified as independents, up from four years ago, and the proportion of Democrats had more than doubled.

Before the results were known, Romney was already calling for the GOP to rally around him, and accept him as the party’s inevitable nominee.

“I want to become the nominee because I want to have our nominee start raising money, start organizing a national campaign and focus on President Obama and his agenda because this is time for us to start focusing on him rather than standing and focusing on one another in these primary contests,” Romney said Tuesday afternoon on conservative talk show host Sean Hannity’s radio program.

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