WASHINGTON (AP) — Mitt Romney’s losses in Alabama and Mississippi underscore a stark reality: The core of his party does not want him.

And that lingering conservative dissatisfaction — on display Tuesday night — threatens to follow Romney into a general election matchup against a Democratic president whose ability to inspire his base is not in question.

Romney’s huge lead in the race for delegates to this summer’s GOP nominating convention seemed forgotten for a night as Rick Santorum reveled in twin victories handed to him by conservatives and evangelicals who dominate the Republican electorate in the party’s only remaining regional stronghold — the South.

Santorum’s success and Romney’s failure exposed deep divisions within a party torn between a conservative base that’s looking for a candidate who is pure on GOP orthodoxy and the rest of the party, which is looking for a nominee able to beat President Barack Obama. Tuesday’s outcomes also virtually ensure the increasingly nasty slog toward the Republican presidential nomination will consume even more of Romney’s time, energy and money when he’d rather be focused solely on the general election, and Obama.

“We will compete everywhere,” an inspired Santorum told cheering supporters in Lafayette, La.

In addition, Santorum’s victories — in states Newt Gingrich recently declared essential to his candidacy — suggested that the former House speaker’s path to victory, already in question before Tuesday’s contests, is virtually nonexistent. Aside from winning his home state of Georgia last week, he has lost nearly two dozen consecutive contests spanning more than seven weeks.