What’s on your mind this weekend, Bleeding Heartland readers? Hope you are enjoying the unseasonably warm spring weather.

Mitt Romney may be the least-liked presidential front-runner ever among the Republican base, but he seems to have a lock on the GOP nomination. Despite losing the Louisiana primary convincingly to Rick Santorum yesterday, Romney has nearly half of the 1,144 delegates needed to secure the nomination. Santorum has fewer than half as many delegates, and only 21 states plus Washington, DC have yet to vote.

Nevertheless, Santorum told his supporters last night that he is in the race for the long haul:

“Ronald Reagan fought that battle in 1976 and he did something that had not been done since: as someone as a conservative running against the establishment, he won 11 states. Well tonight, thanks to the great people of Louisiana, we have won our 11th state in this primary fight,” he said. […]

While Romney called Santorum to congratulate him on his Louisiana win, the two camps were already jockeying to spin the win.

“Rick Santorum is like a football team celebrating a field goal when they are losing by seven touchdowns with less than a minute left in the game,” Ryan Williams, a Romney campaign spokesman, said in a statement released shortly after the call.

Santorum’s team countered with their own statement: “Louisiana voters overwhelmingly rejected Mitt Romney’s push to press the reset button, because they know that we need a clear contrast to President Obama’s disastrous policies. “

“Reset button” refers to Romney adviser Eric Fehrnstrom already-notorious comment the day after the Illinois primary:

When CNN anchor Soledad O’Brien asks about Romney stepping aside for McCain in 2008 and what happens if the other candidates don’t step aside for Romney this year, he replies, “At the time, John McCain did not have the delegates he needed to clinch the nomination but he was clearly on a path to doing that. The math was very challenging for Mitt Romney. And he made the decision that at that time, the country being at war in Iraq, it was important for John McCain to begin to rally the party behind him so he could prepare himself for the fall election campaign. Mitt Romney stepped aside. Now, in Rick Santorum and Newt Gingrich, these are both decent, honorable men who have run good campaigns. They are good Americans. They are good Republicans. And ultimately, I’m confident they’ll make a decision that’s not only right for their party, but right for them.”

He continues, “I think you hit a reset button for the fall campaign. Everything changes. It’s almost like an Etch a Sketch. You can kind of shake it up and we start all over again.”

According to Reuters, “Ohio Art, the low-key, family-run company that has made Etch A Sketch for half a century, saw its sales of the toy soar 1,556 percent above normal levels on Amazon.com within 24 hours of the gaffe.”

Even if that gaffe lingers in the political news, it’s hard to see how Romney’s campaign can be derailed. He netted more delegates from his double-digit win in Illnois last Tuesday than Santorum will net from Louisiana. Moreover, Newt Gingrich and Ron Paul have no plans to drop out of the presidential campaign before the convention, which means Santorum will continue to face competition for “not Romney” voters during the remaining primaries. Even if he wins big in Pennsylvania next month (not guaranteed if Romney carries the Philadelphia suburbs), Santorum can’t come close to catching up in the delegate count.

Connie Cass of the Associated Press discused “5 ways the GOP may finally come up with a nominee” here. Only her first two scenarios seem probable to me: Romney reaches the 1,144 delegate threshold by the time of the Utah primary on June 26, or some of the 117 Republican National Convention superdelegates pull him across the line soon after that.

A contested GOP convention would be more fun to watch, though. I wasn’t old enough to be paying attention when Ronald Reagan nearly grabbed the 1976 nomination from then-President Gerald Ford.

This is an open thread.

UPDATE: Jeff Zeleny and Jim Rutenberg discussed the possibility of a convention floor fight in the New York Sunday Times last week. Excerpt:

Yet Mr. Santorum has hired a delegate specialist to comb through the patchwork of state-by-state rules and to find unpledged delegates who could swing to him in a floor fight, an effort Mr. Romney’s campaign says it is prepared to counter. Newt Gingrich’s team is expected to hold on to its delegates even if it is clear that he has fallen short – if only to keep Mr. Romney from reaching a majority.

And the Republican National Committee has alerted the Committee on Contests to be ready for action, preparing for the possibility of courtroomlike hearings run by lawyers that could decide whether the nomination is settled before party members take their seats in the Tampa Bay Times Forum sports arena. […]

Randy Evans, Mr. Gingrich’s lawyer and senior adviser, said that to reach 1,144, Mr. Romney would have to rely on some of the more than 100 unbound delegates from around the country who have so far given him oral commitments, and “we know in politics how valuable those are.”

Mr. Romney’s campaign said it might have to rely on such commitments, but was not concerned.

Mr. Santorum and Mr. Gingrich believe that they will have an edge over Mr. Romney among the party delegates because, as Mr. Santorum’s new delegate strategist, John P. Yob, said, “the people who show up for county, district and state conventions are much more conservative than your average primary voters.”