Tampa, Florida - Mitt Romney hit the victory in Florida's Republican U.S. presidential primary on Tuesday.
With 76% of the unofficial count, Romney had 47% of the vote compared to 32% for Gingrich, 13% for former Pennsylvania Sen. Rick Santorum and 7% for Texas Rep. Ron Paul.
U.S. television networks projected Romney as the winner just as the last polls closed in Florida.
Official results, with more than 1.5 million votes counted out of a total possible electorate of more than 4 million registered Republicans, also showed Romney at 47%, Gingrich at 32%, Santorum at 13% and Paul at 7%, according to the Florida Department of State website.
Final polls closed at 8 p.m. ET and Romney jumped out to a strong early lead, buoyed by solid support among more than 632,000 voters who cast absentee or early ballots. His solid victory blunted any momentum Gingrich gained from his January 21 victory in South Carolina.
The victory enabled Romney, the wealthy former Massachusetts governor and private equity firm executive, to rebound from his decisive loss to Gingrich in the January 21 South Carolina primary.
The well-funded and well-organized Romney surged in opinion polls in Florida after aggressively pressing Gingrich in two debates and pounding him with negative advertising.
The campaign for the Republican nomination to challenge Obama, a Democrat, in the November 6 election now tilts in Romney's favor with seven contests in February in which he could win or do well, starting with Nevada on Saturday.
The Florida victory also may widen a rift between establishment Republicans who back Romney and conservative voters who favor Gingrich, a dynamic that could complicate the party's effort to oust Obama in November.
"As this primary unfolds, our opponents in the other party have been watching, and they like to comfort themselves with the thought that a competitive campaign will leave us divided and weak," Romney told a jubilant crowd in his victory speech in which he focused on Obama after two weeks of clobbering Gingrich.
"But I've got news for them. A competitive primary does not divide us. It prepares us, and we will win," Romney added.
The Florida primary was the fourth in the series of state-by-state contests to pick the Republican nominee. Romney has triumphed in two of the first four contests, having also won in New Hampshire and coming in second in Iowa and South Carolina.
Romney was helped by the millions of dollars in negative television ads against Gingrich that undermined the argument advanced by the former speaker of the House of Representatives that he is the conservative heir to Republican President Ronald Reagan.
Gingrich fought back with ads of his own, castigating Romney as a party insider and elite friend of Wall Street - and called him "for all practical purposes a liberal." But Gingrich did not have the same amount of money as Romney, who had used a similar advertising spree to cut Gingrich down to size in Iowa.
"It is now clear that this will be a two-person race between the conservative leader Newt Gingrich and the Massachusetts moderate," Gingrich told his supporters after the primary.
The next contest is the Nevada caucuses on Saturday, followed next Tuesday by caucuses in Colorado and Minnesota and a primary in Missouri.