Republican leaders are anticipating a competitive race, complete with on-the-ground campaigning by all of the candidates, because the state party has replaced its winner-take-all primary with a more complex system that could allow other candidates to pick up delegates, even if Mr. Romney wins the most votes.  Mr. Romney has already lined up the support of much of the state’s Republican establishment, including many Republicans in the State Legislature. And a Quinnipiac University poll released on Thursday showed him with a more than two-to-one lead over his nearest opponent, Rick Santorum, among voters likely to participate in the primary on April 24.  “My goal is, frankly, to win and deliver all 95 delegates to Romney, and I think we can do that,” said Mr. Romney’s New York State chairman, Guy V. Molinari, the former congressman and Staten Island borough president.  That would have been a far easier task in 2008, when the party awarded its delegates on the winner-take-all basis. It changed the rules last year to adopt a hybrid system, in which two delegates will be awarded to the winner in each of the state’s 29 Congressional districts. Another 34 delegates will go en masse to any candidate who wins more than 50 percent of the vote statewide; if no candidate wins an absolute majority, those delegates are distributed proportionally among the candidates who win at least 20 percent of the vote. The final three delegates are to be top state party officials.  The result, party leaders say, is that even with Mr. Romney holding a commanding lead statewide, there is still an incentive for the candidates to campaign in New York, hoping to pick up delegates by winning at least some Congressional districts.  Mr. Santorum and Newt Gingrich have already committed to attending the state party’s annual gala dinner in Manhattan the week before the primary. The state Republican chairman, Edward F. Cox, said he expected all of the candidates to campaign in the state, and not just at the party dinner.  “We wanted this to be a party-building exercise,” Mr. Cox said of the revised delegate allocation system, “and it’s turning out that way.”  To be sure, Mr. Romney, who swept the primaries in Wisconsin, Maryland and the District of Columbia on Tuesday, has a huge advantage in New York. His roster of endorsements includes the highest-ranking Republican elected state official, Dean G. Skelos, the Senate majority leader, as well as the last two Republicans to win statewide elections, former Senator Alfonse M. D’Amato and former Gov. George E. Pataki.  “To be perfectly honest, I would hope and wish that the other remaining candidates would endorse Governor Romney and leave before New York, even though obviously it diminishes New York’s role,” Mr. Pataki said.  In the Quinnipiac poll, which was conducted from last Wednesday to Monday, 54 percent of likely voters said they would vote for Mr. Romney. He was trailed by Mr. Santorum, with 21 percent; Mr. Gingrich, with 9 percent; and Ron Paul, with 8 percent. The poll, conducted by telephone of 372 likely Republican primary voters, has a margin of sampling error of plus or minus 5 percentage points.  Four other states — Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, Connecticut and Delaware — will also hold primaries on April 24. And while Pennsylvania will attract the most attention, as Mr. Santorum’s home state, New York offers Mr. Romney an opportunity to stack the mathematical odds further against his opponents.  “He really ought to clean up with 70 percent or more,” said Jeffrey M. Stonecash, a professor of political science at Syracuse University. “He needs to get rid of Santorum, and the more delegates he can run up, the sooner he can do that.”  Mr. Santorum is not without hope. Evangelical Christians have played a role in the New York Republican primary — in 2008, 19 percent of Republican primary voters were evangelicals, according to an Edison Research exit poll. And in a straw poll taken at a conference of evangelical voters in Albany last month, Mr. Santorum received 627 of the 827 votes cast — 76 percent of the total. Mr. Romney, by contrast, finished in fourth place, with 6 percent.  But Mr. Santorum’s hopes have faded considerably since then. The Rev. Jason J. McGuire, the executive director of New Yorkers for Constitutional Freedoms, a conservative group that organized the conference, said he was not sure if evangelical voters would stay committed to Mr. Santorum.  “By the time April 24 rolls around, are they going to say, ‘It’s time to line up behind who looks like the presumptive nominee,’ or, ‘I still want to vote my values, my heart’?” Mr. McGuire asked. “I think that’s the real question: Are people going to be voting the head or the heart? The heart was pretty clear: it was with Santorum.”  Mr. Molinari said the Romney campaign believed Mr. Santorum was focusing its resources on Long Island and western New York. But Michael Rendino, who made an unsuccessful bid for a State Assembly seat in the Bronx in 2010 and is now organizing Mr. Santorum’s efforts in New York, said the campaign intended to open multiple offices in the state within days.  “We don’t have the money as the Romney machine does,” Mr. Rendino said. “We have average everyday Americans and New Yorkers just coming up and volunteering their time to help us out.”  Of Mr. Romney, he added: “Just because the establishment and the media have already coronated him as the Republican nominee — we’re only at the halfway point. All of the people have yet to speak.”  Mr. Gingrich has been a less visible presence thus far, but he has a vocal supporter in Carl P. Paladino, the blunt-spoken Buffalo developer who was the Republican candidate for governor in 2010.
Mitt Romney is firmly in the lead there, but under the state Republican Partyâs new rules, the winner no longer takes all.