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Photo: The Canadian Press. All rights reserved.

Republican presidential candidate Rep. Ron Paul, R-Texas, speaks at Michigan State University during a rally in East Lansing, Mich., Monday, Feb. 27, 2012. (AP Photo/Paul Sancya)

Presidential hopeful Mitt Romney avoided a potentially devastating political defeat in his home state of Michigan on Tuesday, fending off an unexpected challenge from fierce social conservative Rick Santorum that caused paroxysms of panic among the Republican establishment.

Romney won 41 per cent of the vote, according to early, unofficial results. Santorum was three percentage points behind him with 38 per cent. Libertarian congressman Ron Paul was in third at 12 per cent; Newt Gingrich finished last with seven per cent.

"We didn't win by a lot, but we won by enough, and that's all that counts," Romney told supporters in Columbus, OH, site of another high-stakes primary on Super Tuesday next week.

The former Massachusetts governor also won Arizona, which held its winner-takes-all primary on Tuesday as well.

Arizona has almost as many delegates as Michigan, 29 to Michigan's 30, but success there was not considered as symbolically important to Romney's campaign as victory in his home state, even though he walked away from the Grand Canyon State with more delegates.

Michigan's primary rewards delegates based on results, meaning Santorum will leave the state with at least some delegates in advance of Super Tuesday.

While Romney's campaign breathed a serious sigh of relief as the results became known in Michigan on Tuesday night, the celebration was muted given the candidate was expected to decisively coast to victory in the state less than a month ago.

Romney's father, after all, was a longtime auto industry executive and also a popular Michigan governor in the 1960s. The family still has a cottage across the Canada-U.S. border near Grand Bend, Ont.

Santorum, who's spent the last two weeks on the campaign trail cranking up the heat on the nation's ever-percolating culture wars, won a trio of Midwest nominating contests in Missouri, Colorado and Minnesota on Feb. 7. He then rode a wave of momentum into Michigan and was ahead of Romney in state polls for almost two weeks.

The well-heeled Romney's victory signals he can, in fact, appeal to the blue-collar workers who make up a significant bloc of voters in the crucial Midwest swing states. Exit data suggested a large portion of the Michigan electorate on Tuesday was blue-collar.

Santorum's strong performance, however, has proven he too is capable of winning over those same voters. A batch of new polls, however, suggest President Barack Obama is on track to win Michigan in November as the U.S. economy improves.

With women, however, Santorum has a grave problem. He lost women in general to Romney on Tuesday in Michigan; working women, in particular, voted by almost a 10-point margin for the former Massachusetts governor.

Santorum had been firing up the socially conservative base of the party in recent weeks with his controversial positions on abortion, birth control, working women, the separation of church and state and the "snobbery" of Obama for advocating college for Americans. Those views prompted fears among the Republican party brass that he'd be annihilated in a general election.

In his concession speech on Tuesday, Santorum appeared to be back-pedalling on some of those comments by reaching out to women, pointing out that his wife once had a vital career and his mother attended college and worked as a nurse.

"My mom was a professional who actually made more money than her husband," he said. "It taught me a lot of things about how to balance work and family."

His wife Karen, Santorum added, was a recruit to his law firm who then decided to leave the job to raise her children.

"But she also found time to be an author of two books," he said, noting that his family has managed to balance their careers and the needs of their children.

At a rare news conference on earlier Tuesday, Romney took indirect aim at Santorum by saying he wasn't prepared to contort himself politically to win votes.

"It's very easy to excite the base with incendiary comments," Romney said.

"We've seen throughout the campaign that if you're willing to say really outrageous things that are accusatory and attacking President Obama, (then) you're going to jump up in the polls. You know, I'm not willing to light my hair on fire to try and get support. I am who I am."