CHILLICOTHE, OH -- Speaking to several hundred people inside a high school gym Friday, Rick Santorum declared he is running an “insurgent” campaign against a Washington establishment he described as “old boy.”

“We’re running a grassroots, insurgent campaign,” Santorum said, before adding that his own supporters “don’t want what Washington and the old boy network is going to give us again.”

The remarks, an apparent swipe at Mitt Romney, were the latest development in a back-and-forth between the two candidates days before the Super Tuesday contest in Ohio and other key states.

Santorum went to great lengths to paint a picture of his once-long shot candidacy as a populist but viable alternative to Romney’s, telling the crowd his campaign raised about $9 million during February.

“Two thirds of that money came from small-dollar donors,” Santorum said, adding, “two thirds of Governor Romney’s money comes from people who max out at 25-hundred dollars.”

(Per federal elections law, the limit on individual contributions to a national political campaign is $2,500.)

But nowhere was the tension between the two men more evident than in Santorum’s attack on the Michigan Republican Party for awarding a delegate Thursday to Romney, tilting what the Santorum team had assumed was a tied delegate count in Tuesday’s primary in Michigan to a 16-14 haul in Romney’s favor.

“They were so embarrassed yesterday they decided to change the rules after the fact,” said Santorum of the state's Republican Party, which he said “felt bad” that Romney hadn’t won the delegate count outright.

“You know, my feeling on that is conservatives – Americans – play by the rules,” Santorum added.  “We don’t change the rules afterward.”

In a measure of the tightening race here in Ohio, a Romney aide circulated among reporters at the event Friday, offering responses to Santorum’s attacks. 

“He’s sour that he’s just lost three straight states,” said Ryan Williams, a Romney campaign spokesman, of Santorum and the result of contests in Arizona, Michigan and Wyoming this week.  (The Wyoming caucuses straw poll was non-binding.)

Williams added that a rule awarding two “at-large” Republican delegates to the winner of the popular vote in Michigan had been decided by the state GOP prior to the Feb. 28th primary.

The sniping didn’t end there.

In remarks to reporters following his speech, Santorum also commented on a video first reported by ABC News, showing Romney vowing in 2002 to pursue federal money for in-state projects in Massachusetts.

“Hypocrisy, plain and simple,” Santorum said of the video, which was shot during the Massachusetts governor’s race. Romney has made attacking Santorum for the practice of “earmarking” central in his effort to ward off the former Pennsylvania senator.

But among voters Friday, the candidates' attacks on each other didn’t seem to register.

Patty Null, a retired teacher living on social security, said her main concern is Ohio’s flagging economy.

“Our taxes are too high, our utilities are too high,” she said. “We just can’t make it anymore.”

WASHINGTON -- Alice Stewart, who served as communications director for Michele Bachmann's failed presidential campaign, has been named national press secretary for one of her former boss' chief rivals – Rick Santorum.

The hire comes at a time when Santorum's campaign is touting a spike in momentum and money after winning races in Colorado, Minnesota and Missouri on Tuesday.  

The Republican presidential hopeful has pulled in more than $3 million in contributions since the three-state victory.

"He's right on the issues and hasn't flipped flopped on the issues," Stewart said of the former Pennsylvania senator.  "People are starting to recognize that. He didn't come to the game like Romney did with the name ID that Romney had."

Stewart will serve under the direction of national communications director Hogan Gidley. In the previous campaign cycle, they both worked for 2008 presidential candidate Mike Huckabee's political action committee, HuckPAC.

Santorum often jokes that he runs his campaign on a "shoestring budget," and even when money began to come in after his Iowa caucus victory, his staff remained small compared to those of his rivals. 

The candidate frequently travels without any members of his communications staff, which has on occasions led to logistical problems and miscommunication between media and the campaign.

"We always planned to staff up when the time is right, and the time is right," said Gidley. But he also cautioned, "We'll never be the bureaucratic, DC behemoth that Mitt Romney's campaign is … that's not what Rick Santorum is. He won’t surrounded by handlers."

The development reflects a split among senior veterans of the Bachmann campaign, who have remained friendly while being hired in separate directions.

Two members of Bachmann's staff went to work for Mitt Romney in the days after Bachmann left the race – including high-profile debate coach Brett O'Donnell.

(O'Donnell apparently split abruptly from Romney's staff last week.)

Reached by telephone Saturday night, Stewart said her move does not indicate that her former boss will endorse her new one.

"She's made it clear she's not in any hurry to endorse," Stewart said about Bachmann.

Bachmann dropped out of the race Jan. 4, one day after finishing last among the candidates competing in the Iowa caucuses.

Stewart will likely begin her new job next week when Santorum travels to Michigan.

Almost one month after abandoning her presidential campaign, Michele Bachmann today announced that she will be running for re-election to Congress in Minnesota.

Word of her plans, first conveyed to the Associated Press during a Jan. 25 interview, puts to rest questions about what Bachmann’s career would hold after her run for the GOP presidential nomination catapulted her into national headlines.

Bachmann was elected to Congress in 2006, during the year that Democrats swept congressional elections and took over majority of the US House and Senate.

Citing “the absolute need” to repeal the federal health-care law and the banking regulations embedded in the Dodd-Frank legislation, Bachmann declared in an email today that she is “not done."

“Our campaign [for president] changed the focus of this presidential election.”

Meanwhile, Bachmann’s presidential campaign still carries debt up to $447,000, according to 4th quarter numbers released Tuesday.

Bachmann ended her campaign on Jan. 4, one day after finishing in sixth place in the Iowa caucuses, last among the candidates competing in the state.

THE VILLAGES, Fla. -- The Republican Party of Florida is pushing back on reports that Mitt Romney’s campaign stacked the audience at the CNN debate Thursday in Jacksonville with its supporters -- a charge the party blames on aides to former House Speaker Newt Gingrich.

“I’m sorry if the Newt campaign feels like they didn’t have their best night, but I can’t allow the RPOF to be the scapegoat for that,” spokesman Brian Hughes told NBC News by telephone Friday night. 

"We worked very hard,” Hughes added.  “The irony is there were some grumblings by Romney’s people in the hours before the debate that we had stacked it for Newt.”

(The state party, not the Romney campaign, was responsible for seating about three-quarters of the 1,200-seat venue.)

The pushback from the state party follows a story in the Huffington Post that quotes a Gingrich aide saying Romney’s campaign “definitely packed the room” in Jacksonville. 

The aide, Kevin Kellems, was apparently making a reference to applause Romney enjoyed during several sharp exchanges with Gingrich.  It marked a reversal of sorts for the former speaker, who won the support of crowds during two debates in South Carolina last week.

Romney campaign officials dismissed allegations that they packed the debate hall Thursday. One senior spokesman said he had invited only his parents.

First Thoughts: Romney owned Gingrich, but problems linger

Speaking in Orlando on Friday night, Romney compared the Gingrich campaign to Goldilocks complaining about her bowls of porridge being too hot or too cold.

"I'm looking forward to debating Barack Obama. I'm not going to worry about the crowd," Romney said.

Hughes tells NBC News that the state party worked to ensure that 900 seats went to unaffiliated Republican voters and remained off limits to volunteers and others connected to campaigns. There were 4,000 total requests for seats via the party’s website and county Republican offices.

Romney stresses support for immigration before Latino crowd

Hughes says that voters found to be affiliated with candidates were told to seek seats from the campaigns, each of which had an equally distributed number.

“Any time that we saw a name that we recognized, or had a suspicion, we contacted those people, and said, 'listen, you’re affiliated with X campaign,'" Hughes says.

The Florida Republican Party is not endorsing a candidate for president until the national party has a nominee.

NBC’s Garrett Haake contributed to this report.

TAMPA, FL -- The battle over the Latino vote is heating up in south Florida.

Newt Gingrich is out with a radio ad playing on local Spanish-language stations that hits former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney for being “the most anti-immigrant candidate.”

“Mitt Romney is a government liberal, from the state of and similar to Kennedy. He is the most anti-immigrant candidate,” the ad charges, according to a translation by the Miami Herald.

Immigration has emerged as a wedge issue between Romney and the former House speaker.  Romney has insisted that illegal immigrants should go to their native countries to apply for permanent residency, while Gingrich has proposed a system of "citizen review boards," by which illegal immigrants who have lived in the U.S. for a certain number of years could win residency status without returning home.

"With regards to those that have come here illegally now, we're not going to round them all up and deport them. But we're also not going to give them a preferential pathway to become permanent residents," Romney said last night, during the CNN debate in Charleston, S.C. 

"Coming here illegally," he continued, "should not give you an advantage being able to become a permanent resident of the United States."

The remarks won applause from the conservative audience.

Gingrich may hope that his own message will play among south Florida's various immigrant communities, where in some cases attitudes may differ. But the ad also clearly aims to discredit Romney among the Cuban community in particular, where another issue -- Cuba’s Castro regime -- is a chief concern.

Resurrecting a gaffe from the last presidential cycle, the ad hits Romney for misattributing a Fidel Castro quote to Venezuelan dictator Hugo Chavez during a stop in Miami in 2007.

The ad begins with archival tape of Castro using his signature phrase, “Fatherland or Death, we will prevail.”

The narrator says, “Surprising enough, this statement was also made by Mitt Romney.”

(According to the Miami Herald, Romney had mistakenly told voters that “Hugo Chavez has tried to steal an inspiring phrase” that in fact “belongs to a free Cuba.”)

“Unlike Romney, who uses statements from Castro, Newt Gingrich has fought against the regime with Lincoln and Ileana to approve Helms-Burton,” the ad continues, referencing a 1996 act that strengthened the U.S. embargo against Cuba.

That charge won pushback from the Romney campaign today, which points out that the two Florida politicians cited in the ad -– former Congressman Lincoln Diaz-Balart and Congresswoman Ileana Ros-Lehtinen –- have both endorsed Romney, along Diaz-Balart's younger brother, Mario, who succeeded Lincoln in Congress.

"Mario Diaz-Balart, Ileana Ros-Lehtinen and Lincoln Diaz-Balart all stand with Mitt Romney because he has laid out a clear vision for spreading democracy in our hemisphere. By attacking anyone who supports common-sense border security and immigration reforms as ‘anti-immigrant,’ Newt Gingrich is once again reading from Barack Obama’s liberal talking points," Romney spokesman Alberto Martinez said in a statement to NBC News.

According to the Florida GOP, more than 143,000 votes have already been cast in the Florida primary through absentee and early votes.

The total number is mostly made up of absentee votes, but early voting -- which Florida allows -- also makes up a small portion of the number. Per Florida GOP spokesman Brian Hughes, 138,043 votes have been cast via absentee ballot; 5,024 have been cast in early voting.

1.9 million Florida Republicans voted in the 2008 Florida primary.

The news comes on the same day that Iowa's Jan. 3 caucuses were thrown into question by a certification of results showing Rick Santorum pulling ahead of the once-declared victor, Mitt Romney. (Because of votes missing in eight precincts, NBC News won't declare a winner in that contest.)

The Miami Herald, putting salt in Iowa's wounds, notes today there have already been more votes cast early in Florida than the record-breaking total of 122,000 total cast cast in Iowa's caucuses.

MIAMI, FL –- An email posing questions about traditional Christianity’s view of the role of women in political life is the subject of a bitter complaint today by a former member of Rep. Michele Bachmann’s presidential campaign. 

The email was sent last summer from the personal account of an Iowa staffer working for former Pennsylvania Sen. Rick Santorum. It was first reported Friday by the Des Moines Register.

The email reads, in part: "Is it Gods highest desire, that is, His biblically expressed will... to have a woman rule the institutions of the Family, the Church, and the State?"

Reached by telephone Saturday, the author of the email -- Jamie Johnson -- told NBC News his email has been "blown way out of proportion," and does not represent official campaign correspondence.  

Johnson, who is a pastor at a central Iowa church, is Santorum’s “Iowa coalitions director,” tasked with building support among the state’s evangelical community.

"I was sharing my personal reflections with a friend through my private email account -– not the campaign account," Johnson said. “They were reflections on over 25 years of formal, theological study” based in “classical Christian doctrine.”

But the email, passed this summer from its recipient to a member of the Bachmann campaign, is raising questions about attitudes inside the evangelical voting bloc over which Bachmann and Santorum competed in the run-up to the Jan. 3 caucuses.  

Santorum finished a close second in the contest; Bachmann finished in last place among those competing and dropped out of the presidential race the next day.

Peter Waldron, who lives in Florida and worked nationally Iowa as Bachmann’s “faith outreach coordinator,” says that “misogyny was a serious issue in Iowa” -- and argues that “medieval attitudes” are to blame, in part, for his candidate’s weak showing.

He is today demanding an apology from Santorum over a “sexist strategy” in the state, sending a press release only hours before Santorum won the support of a key meeting of national evangelical leaders.

Citing Johnson’s email, Waldron makes this charge: “Evangelical surrogates [for Santorum] promoted the idea that a female cannot be an elected official or a commander-in-chief.”

(Waldron, who has managed Christian outreach for Republican candidates since Ronald Reagan’s 1980 run, received a rash of press himself this summer, over his 2006 arrest in Uganda on terrorism charges.  He tells NBC News he was there on a Christian mission, and his arrest had to do with his opposition to the sitting president's effort to force a third term through the legislature.)

Native observers of political and religious life in Iowa are more measured, but acknowledge a debate over Bachmann's gender emerged in churches after her presidential fortunes slipped.

"I know of pastors who were supporting her before the [Aug. 13] straw poll, and then I saw pastors try to tell everybody when she was plummeting in the polls that we needed male leadership," says the Des Moines-based, nationally-syndicated radio host Steve Deace, who is supporting former House Speaker Newt Gingrich for president.

"She was trying to get elected as a woman," Deace adds about Bachmann. "And I think in general people in both parties are more comfortable voting for men. Just ask Hillary Clinton." 

MIAMI, Fla. -- Playing defense for a second day over his attacks on former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney’s business career, Newt Gingrich accused the GOP front-runner this morning of trying to “hide” his private sector record.

“Governor Romney has been campaigning on the premise that he created 100,000 jobs. And he knows how to create jobs,” Gingrich said, of Romney’s career at the private equity firm Bain Capital, where he served as CEO.

“Release the records. Show us the facts,” Gingrich added. “You can’t run for president, have half your campaign be about your great achievements, and then hide them. And it’s silly to try. Mine are out in the open. It’s a mater of public record.”

(Of course, other elements of Gingrich’s career are not exactly “out in the open." Gingrich made money, for example, as a television commentator and from speeches, but none of that can be discerned from Gingrich’s financial disclosure because of the way he chose to file. Gingrich was also criticized for taking money from Freddie Mac as a “consultant,” but Gingrich never released what he exactly did for them or how much he made -- despite promises to do so.)

The remarks came during a visit to Café Versailles restaurant, where Gingrich addressed about 50 supporters inside a back room crowded with campaign staff, security guards, and local and national TV cameras.

Gingrich, the former Speaker of the House, told supporters that he created “millions of jobs” as a young member of Congress under Ronald Reagan, and repeated a refrain that he created 11-million jobs with Bill Clinton during his time as Speaker of the House.

“To question a presidential candidate’s claim that he created jobs is not to attack capitalism -- it’s to question a candidate,” Gingrich insisted.

The defense of his strategy, which came in the middle of his speech and was unprovoked by a question from the press, marked the latest in a back-and-forth between Gingrich and several high-profile conservatives, who have spoken out in Romney’s defense.

But this morning, here in Miami’s Little Havana neighborhood, where the relationship with Cuba is a top issue, supporters said it was Gingrich’s foreign-policy plank that drew them to the event. 

Near the restaurant’s take-out window, where people lined up for Styrofoam cups of Cuban coffee, supporter John Smithies stood with several yard signs he planned to distribute in his Coral Gables neighborhood.

Smithies, who was born in Pennsylvania to an American father and a Cuban mother, grew up in Havana until he was sent to high school in Connecticut, and college at Tulane -- where Gingrich received his Ph.D. in history.

“He’s been the strongest one to condemn the government of Cuba,” Smithies said. “If we are seeking liberty for people in the world -- and we’ve done it in Libya, and other places in the word -- we should be doing it for a country that’s been subjected to a dictatorship for 53 years.” 

CONCORD, N.H. -- The heir to liberty may be ready to bear the torch.

On a solo outing as his father’s chief surrogate here Saturday, Sen. Rand Paul, R-Ky., left the door wide open to a presidential run in 2016 were his father, Texas Rep. Ron Paul, not to win the Republican nomination.

“First things first is that I’m here trying to help my dad,” Paul said, when asked about a possible bid. “I can’t answer any questions beyond that -- other than to say that I am interested in national debate.”

The careful remarks came during a forum held at a local restaurant Saturday morning, sponsored by the Bartlett Center for Public Policy, a conservative think tank. They seemed to mark a new step in the national political career of a second generation of the Paul family -- a widely expected development. 

The elder Paul, at 76 years old, is in the midst of his third run for the GOP nomination. Rand Paul, who turned 49 on Saturday, was elected to a Senate seat in Kentucky in 2010 -- and seems poised to inherit the movement his father generated inside the libertarian corner of the Republican Party.

“I am interested in long-range goals of changing the country," Rand Paul said, "having a more limited federal government, having more local control of our government. You do that by appearing in the media, speaking to groups around the country, sometimes running for national office -- or maybe, in the Senate.”

Paul’s visit here to The Draft restaurant, a regular stump spot in New Hampshire, was the first of two appearances he made on behalf of his father Saturday, three days before the New Hampshire primary. His appearances included vigorous arguments on Ron Paul’s behalf, especially in the area of foreign policy -- where other GOP candidates have sought to portray the Texas congressman as weak, or naïve.

Addressing a crowd of about 200 people at Windham High School, south of Concord, Paul fielded several questions about his father’s position on Iran.

“Others have said, ‘Well, Ron Paul doesn’t care about Iran getting a nuclear weapon.’  I think that’s an inaccurate representation of my father’s position,” Paul said.

“The question really then becomes,” he added, “if they do get a nuclear weapon, is there only one alternative? Is the only alternative war?"

Despite Paul’s effort to direct attention toward his father, audiences seemed unmistakably interested in him. Among the handful of people who showed up to the low-key forum here in Concord, few still were Ron Paul supporters -- though they were drawn in by the chance to see his son.

Spec Bowers -- a state representative from Sunapee who is supporting Texas Gov. Rick Perry -- approached Paul after the event to discuss local politics.

Asked why he came to the forum, Bowers told NBC News, "I came here to shake the hand of a future president."