Since Super Tuesday, we’ve all listened to Santorum supporters cry for Newt to pull out of the race claiming Rick could gather enough votes to beat Romney.

Today; however, GALLUP released a poll which effectively proves their claims false.

When polled about which alternate candidate they would support if Gingrich indeed dropped out, Newt’s supporters are split between Romney and Santorum.  In fact, 40% of them say they’d vote for Romney while 39% say they’d move to Santorum.  So for every vote Santorum gets, Romney gets one, too.

As GALLUP states in their analysis:

While Gingrich and Santorum are thought to be competing for the same conservative voters, it is more the case that Gingrich, Santorum, and Romney are competitive among conservatives. For many Gingrich supporters, Romney — not Santorum — would be their fallback option if Gingrich dropped out.

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Thus, for Santorum to overtake Romney, it may not be as simple as picking up additional support from Gingrich voters should the former speaker of the House drop out, since Romney would likely benefit at least as much as Santorum. Rather, Santorum would also likely need to cut into Romney’s current base of support to gain ground on the frontrunner.

While it remains true that Santorum has technically won more states and a handful of more delegates than Gingrich has, there are other factors to consider in which Non-Romney is best positioned when the goal is moved from simply being the front-runner to making it all the way to the convention with as many delegates as possible.

In the state of Illinois for example, while popular votes are counted, they don’t decide delegates.  Delegates are decided by Congressional districts and while Santorum is projecting better than Gingrich by varying points in various polls, there are four districts in Chicago where Santorum will not even be on the ballot — but Gingrich will.

So despite the amount of votes Santorum gets in Illinois, the amount of delegates awarded to both might be a lot closer than Santorum supporters are counting on.

Further, Santorum forgets how he benefited from the millions of dollars in negative advertising against Gingrich in Iowa (where Mitt “drew first blood” as Palin said) where he wound up winning by a very small margin.  But what about the bigger states Newt got more votes in than Santorum did?  Florida and Nevada are two examples.  Even though he lost those states, he picked up a significant greater amount of votes than Santorum did.

The chances of Newt Gingrich dropping out of this race are getting slimmer while the chances of a brokered convention are getting bigger everyday.