Washington, March 14: With just under eight months to go for the American presidential election, the political landscape here is looking much like the Uttar Pradesh poll scene before voting and similar to Uttarakhand’s political map after the Assembly results.

Yesterday’s Republican primaries in Mississippi and Alabama added to the confusion about an eventual party nominee who will challenge President Barack Obama in November. In both these southern primaries, Mitt Romney, who has hitherto been described as the “Mr Inevitable” for Republicans this year, was relegated to the third place by the party’s voters.

In a clear demonstration of the right wing’s hold on the Republican party, two arch conservative aspirants for the presidency, Rick Santorum and Newt Gingrich together secured nearly 65 per cent of the votes polled, leaving Mitt Romney, the establishment’s moderate face, with just about 30 per cent support within the party.

Contributing to the confusion in America’s political landscape is a new opinion poll on Monday in which Obama’s approval rating among prospective voters slipped below the 50 per cent mark, reversing a steady rise in his favour during successive recent months.

What is worrying Democrats is that this ABC News/Washington Post poll predicted that if the presidential election was to be held today, Romney would defeat Obama in a 49 to 47 per cent outcome among registered voters.

Obama’s short-lived rise in popularity that was owed to a general perception that the US economy was recovering from recession has been set back by a steep rise in petrol prices in recent weeks caused by continuing turmoil in the Arab world.

Only a month ago, the same poll put Obama at 51 per cent in a hypothetical contest against Romney’s 45 per cent. A nightmare for Democrats is that Monday’s poll registered a five-point gain even for Santorum and showed that he could win narrowly against Obama 49 to 46 per cent if an election took place now.

Obama’s campaign acknowledged the difficulties facing the President in a statement, but it is putting on a brave face. In fact, typical of the startegies that propelled Obama unexpectedly into the White House in 2008, his campaign is using the latest poll to scare people about a Romney presidency and raise election funds.

“We are looking at a race that will be tighter than you think. And the other side has groups ready to spend hundreds of millions of dollars to tear down President Obama,” his campaign responded to the ABC News/Washington Post poll.

“We cannot underestimate someone like Romney who has shown he will spend and say anything to win. We need to turn up the pressure now. If the idea of a President Romney scares you, it is time to own a piece of this campaign,” the statement urged Democrats and independents.

Romney whose family hails from Michigan is a New Englander by domicile, having been Governor of Massachusetts. An alien in America’s South, unlike Gingrich who represented Georgia for many years in the US House of Representatives and became its Speaker, Romney clumsily tried to adopt Southern ways in the run up to yesterday's primaries.

Appearing at campaign stops with popular Southern comedian Jeff Foxworthy, a Georgian, Romney ate grits, a staple among Southerners and joked that he would go hunting, which is popular in that part of the US, once he learned how to handle a hunting weapon.

But such contrived efforts to ape local customs and traditions only appear to have put off voters in Alabama and Mississippi. Gingrich, who came second in both states, said after the results that even though he did not win, he is determined to drag out the process of deciding a Republican candidate right until the party’s nominating convention in Tampa, Florida, at the end of August.

He described Romney as a creation of the liberal US media. “One of the things tonight proved is that the elite media’s effort to convince the nation that Mitt Romney is inevitable just collapsed,” Gingrich said of last night’s results. “If you are the front-runner and you keep coming in third, you are not much of a front-runner.”

Santorum, Pennsylvania’s former US Senator, said at a victory rally last night that “we did it again! This campaign is about ordinary folks doing extraordinary things, sort of like America.” He was referring to his underdog status in his party where Romney has money and organisation that no other candidate can match.

Despite last night’s victories, Santorum faces an uphill task against Romney. Delegates to the nominating convention are awarded from most state primaries on proportional representation.

Even after the deeply negative results from Alabama and Mississippi, Romney has more delegates so far that the combined total of his three opponents.

The latest figures show Romney with 496 delegates, Santorum with 236, Gingrich with 141 and a fourth candidate, Texas Congressman Ron Paul, has 67. A total of 1,144 delegates are needed for the Republican presidential nomination.

Romney’s big problem is that he may attain that magic figure, but without support from the party’s core base in the Southern states. He won convincingly last night in Hawaii with a 20 point lead over Santorum and trounced Gingrich and Paul. He also won in in American Samoa picking up all its nine delegates, but nobody even noticed those victories that were overshadowed by his Southern losses.