On Tuesday March 6, 11 states across the country -- Alaska, Georgia, Idaho, Massachusetts, North Dakota, Ohio, Oklahoma, Tennessee, Vermont, Virginia, and Wyoming -- will hold contests that will award a combined 424 delegates. That’s more than any other one day this Republican primary season. Up until now, there have been 12 contests (in some form or fashion), with Mitt Romney winning seven of them, Rick Santorum four, Newt Gingrich one, and Ron Paul zero. NBC’s current delegate count stands at Romney 119, Gingrich 30, Santorum 17, Paul 8.

The GOP presidential candidates have different strategies and strongholds in these 11 contests. Romney hopes to lock down his home state of Massachusetts, Vermont, and Virginia (where only he and Paul are on the ballot). Santorum is expecting wins in Oklahoma and Tennessee. Gingrich has focused on his home state of Georgia. And Paul has concentrated on the caucuses in Alaska, Idaho, and North Dakota. The biggest prize is Ohio, where all the candidates -- except for Paul -- have campaigned. But more than anything else, Super Tuesday is a math race: Which candidate can rack up the most delegates from these 11 states? Note that many of these contests award delegates proportionally, so a second-place (or even third place) finish can get you delegates.

Click here to read the NBC News Super Tuesday Guide, complete with analysis of the candidates’ strategies, ad spending, candidate travel, history of Super Tuesday – when and why they’ve mattered, and a complete state-by-state breakdown of the delegates at stake, rules, procedures, poll opening and closing times, and full results so far.

MACON, GA -- For the first time this cycle, the Newt Gingrich campaign is directly targeting Rick Santorum to voters -- rolling out robo calls in two key Super Tuesday states against the former Pennsylvania senator.

In the next 24 hours, 150,000 households in both Oklahoma and Tennessee will hear a female voice hitting Santorum on supporting “big labor.”

“On the campaign trail Rick Santorum talks a good game about his blue collar roots and about being for the average family,” the females says. “As senator from Pennsylvania, Santorum cozied up to the labor union bosses and voted for the AFL-CIO and against a national 'right to work' bill that would have let workers opt-out of paying union dues Union dues that hurt families and small businesses.”

“Rick Santorum -- friend of working families or the Union bosses pal? You decide,” the robo call ends.

This is the first paid “advertisement” focusing on a GOP opponent the Gingrich campaign has paid for since Florida. Gingrich is battling for his political life and sees his path back to the front of the pack through the Southern states. Santorum seems to be the Speaker’s biggest competition down South.

Gingrich campaign spokesman, R.C. Hammond, said Santorum has a “Jimmy Hoffa problem.”

“Rick Santorum is the one who has to come to Georgia and explain why he tried to bury his big labor voting record in the end zone of this primary,” Hammond said.

AP Photo/Evan Vucci

Former House Speaker Newt Gingrich speaks during a rally in Woodstock, Ga. on Thursday, March 1

WOODSTOCK, GA -- Newt Gingrich told Georgians Thursday just how vital a win here in his home state next Tuesday really is to his campaign.

“I have to win Georgia, I think, to be credible in the race,” Gingrich told a sold-out Cobb Country Chamber of Commerce breakfast in Atlanta this morning.

The former House Speaker is trying to mount a third comeback in the race for the 2012 Republican presidential nomination. Mitt Romney and Rick Santorum potentially stand in his way as they’ve already won 128 and 29 delegates respectively. Gingrich has also secured 29 delegates. Winning the state of Georgia with 50 percent of the vote would give a candidate 76 delegates, the most of any of the 10 states on Super Tuesday.

And even Gingrich acknowledges Romney or Santorum could become the nominee even though he finds them irrelevant.

“One of them may win because money matters but I don’t think they are relevant because they are just politics, they are just the same old bologna,” he said. “One is Massachusetts’s moderate bologna, the other is Pennsylvania big labor bologna but they are bologna.”

But, Gingrich says of Romney, who is seen in the eyes of many as the inevitable choice to compete against President Barack Obama this fall, is still beatable. 

“You’ve now seen Governor Romney, who’s spent maybe 10 times as much money as the rest of us, can’t close the sale,” Gingrich said. “Well, if he can’t close the sale our job is to go out and keep making the sale until we finish closing it.”

The Romney campaign and the Restore Our Future super PAC have far outspent Gingrich as the Gingrich campaign and his Winning Our Future super PAC have not been able to raise as much money as the former Massachusetts Governor.

Just in Georgia alone, the pro-Romney SuperPAC has spent $1.5 million while Winning Our Future has spent $1.1 million; the Romney campaign itself spent $327,000 and Gingrich just $15,000.

Gingrich told the crowds today, he hopes his message will resonate with voters even without the big money his competitors can attract and he can win with “people power.”

In the end, the race comes down to which of the remaining candidates can beat Obama, Gingrich argues.

“We have two nice people running who are not visionaries,” the Speaker says about his two chief Republican opponents during a speech outside the Cherokee County Georgia Republican Headquarters here. “We have a president who has the wrong vision. So we need to match our positive vision of an American future with his negative vision of a socialist, bureaucratic, secular future.”

ATLANTA —Predicting an extended nominating fight, Mitt Romney said Wednesday he didn't expect the GOP primary season to result in a "coronation," all while downplaying a sweep of three nominating contests last night by Rick Santorum. 

Romney said he still expected to become the Republican Party's nominee against President Obama this fall, but seemed to brace for a longer-than-expected path to the nomination. 

“We think we can beat Sen. Santorum where we compete head-to-head in an aggressive way, and we obviously didn’t do that in Colorado or Minnesota to the extent that the other campaign did," Romney said on an airport Tarmac here in Georgia. "There will certainly be places where he wins, and there will be places where I win. There’s no such thing as coronations in presidential politics. It’s meant to be a long process. It’s not easy to get the nomination, it’s not easy to be elected president and this is a testing ... a testing approach. And so far we’re doing pretty well.”

Last night's contests — in which no delegates were awarded, Romney's campaign was quick to point out — did not, however, go so well for Romney. He suffered double digit defeats in Minnesota, where he won four years ago, and in Missouri, where Newt Gingrich did not appear on the ballot. In Colorado, a state where Romney competed actively and where the campaign seemed confident of a win, he lost by five points to Santorum.

Asked today about lessons learned in the defeat, Romney came out swinging, lumping Santorum together with Gingrich as a creature of Washington, and blaming both men for fostering a spending and earmark culture that ultimately hurt the Republican party, and spawned the Tea Party movement. The former Massachusetts governor said he did not respond to attacks while campaigning in Nevada, but that going forward he would make differences between himself and his opponents "very clear."

"Under Newt Gingrich earmarks doubled. Rick Santorum was a major earmarker and continues to defend earmarks. Under Rick Santorum he voted to raise the debt ceiling I believe five different times to a tune of about an addition $3.5 trillion," Romney said. "I believe that while Sen. Santorum was serving in congress and the Senate, government spending increased by some 80%.  Republicans spent too much money, borrowed too much money, earmarked too much, and Rick Santorum and Newt Gingrich have to be held accountable."

Romney followed up with a spending-based attack on Santorum at a rally later on: "During Sen. Santorum's time in Washington, government grew 80 percent. And he voted to raise the debt ceiling five times."

Perhaps looking to reclaim his economy-oriented message, Romney turned his attack on Santorum and Gingrich into an attack on borrowing and spending more broadly, and hammered his point home.

"When Republicans act like Democrats, they lose.  And in Newt Gingrich’s case he had to resign.  In Rick Santorum’s case, he lost by the biggest margin of any Senate incumbent since 1980. Again, borrowing, spending, and earmarking is not a good combination if you’re a Republican and not a good combination, in my view, for America," Romney said.