Santorum hopes to add Louisiana to his list of Southern successes, and he held his Tuesday night victory rally there.
The primary in Puerto Rico, where residents cannot vote in the fall election, is drawing unusual prominence.
In an interview with a San Juan newspaper, El Vocero, Santorum said Puerto Rico should only gain statehood if the territory makes English its main language. Puerto Rico's official language is Spanish and most Puerto Ricans feel strongly about maintaining their culture and language.
"As in any other state, you have to comply with this and any federal law. And that is that English has to be the main language," Santorum told the paper. "There are other states with more than one language as is the case in Hawaii, but to be a state in the United States, English has to be the main language."
There is no federal law designating English as the country's official language, although some states and local governments have adopted such "English only" laws.
Santorum met briefly with Gov. Luis Fortuno, who has endorsed Romney, and later spoke to a town hall-style audience.
He defended his decision not to try to block the promotion of Sonia Sotomayor to be a federal appeals court judge when he was a U.S. senator from Pennsylvania — a promotion that eventually led to her nomination and confirmation as the first Latina justice on the Supreme Court. He said the Senate should allow "great deference to the president" in selecting lower court nominees and said he would expect that if he were president.
Many Republican senators voted against Sotomayor's high court confirmation in 2009. Santorum had been defeated for re-election in 2006.
With a handful of delegates yet to be allocated from Tuesday's races, the Associated Press tally showed Romney with 495 of the 1,144 needed for the nomination. Santorum had 252, Gingrich 131 and Ron Paul 46.
In a year of up-and-down turnout, Republican primary voters in Alabama and Mississippi cast ballots in record numbers.
Unofficial Alabama turnout was 621,549, topping the previous high, 554,639 in 2008, by 12 percent.
In Mississippi, unofficial turnout was 289,826, surpassing the previous high, 158,526 in 1988, by 83 percent.
In both cases, voters had an unexpectedly important role in the selection of a party nominee. It is rare for a Republican campaign to remain competitive until spring.
In this case, exit polls showed an electorate that was overwhelmingly conservative, distrustful of the federal government and eager to turn Obama out of office.
That consensus masked deep divisions when it came to sorting out the Republican field, though, and religion appeared to play a role.
Born again or evangelical voters accounted for about 80 percent of all the votes cast in Alabama and Hawaii, and Santorum picked up about 35 percent support from those voters in both states, compared with about 31 percent for Gingrich. Romney picked up 31 percent in Mississippi, the closer of the two races, but only about 27 percent in Alabama. Neither performance came close to the 38 percent support he had among evangelicals in Florida, where he was victorious.
Conservative resistance was more than a match in Mississippi for the support Romney had from the party establishment. Gov. Phil Bryant and both of the state's Republican National Committee members endorsed him.
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Associated Press writers Kasie Hunt in Puerto Rico and Stephen Ohlemacher contributed to this report.
Copyright 2012 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.
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John of NY 6:48AM March 14, 2012