Rick Santorum won big victories in three small contests in the Republican presidential race last Tuesday. In doing so, he reshaped the oft-reshaped nomination battle once again. But he has not installed himself as the favorite, and neither he nor Mitt Romney has established himself as the candidate who can do best in the general election.

These were small contests not because the states involved were small — Missouri, Minnesota, and Colorado all have populations near the national average — but because the primary in Missouri and the caucuses in Minnesota and Colorado are nonbinding, so their results don’t give any candidate any convention delegates.

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