Polls will be closing shortly in Alabama and Mississippi, and the (other) polls are showing a very close three-way race.
I don’t care what Gingrich says, if he doesn’t win at least one of these states, he’s toast. These are the states that Gingrich must have to demonstrate that he has any real base at all. If he doesn’t take them, he’s got nothing.
It’s less important for Santorum, but they’re also states where he should expect to do better than Romney. They’re heart-of-the-South, very conservative states, and if Romney wins them both, it’s all over but the shouting.
They’re both open primaries.
Hawaii and American Samoa, I have no opinions on. I’ll be in bed by the time results come in anyway.
Be interesting to see if Newt sticks around if he loses both states. On the one hand, it seems pretty hopeless if he can’t even when the deep south, on the other hand, it seems pretty hopeless now and he’s still there.
He keeps saying he’s in it to the convention. I don’t get it. Perhaps he seriously thinks that Romney won’t have a majority.
Personally, I think that if by some happenstance there is not a first ballot victory, none of the four current candidates are going to get the nomination. It’ll go to Jeb Bush.
The candidates don’t really win states. It’s a media fiction. They’re likely to end up with similar delegate numbers, right? And figuring in Hawaii and Samoa, Romney might pad his lead for the night. They keep burying delegate info and emphasizing popular votes and narrow “victories” that mean little to the delegate math because they want people to be believe this is a tight race; looking at delegates, Romney has a commanding lead. It’s like if football announcers kept hammering on yards gained by two teams and forgot repeatedly to mention the points scored.
They’ll spin it as a huge set back even if he pads his delegate lead a bit with the Pacific totals. They want it to be a long, drawn out media event because otherwise all of those pointy headed experts will have nothing to talk about for several months.
Well, there’s 96% reporting in Mississippi, so it looks like it’ll end up that way.
There’ll be the oh-so-sincere wringing of hands by the punditerati that Romney just can’t seem to close the deal with conservatives, as his delegate totals continue to climb out of reach of Santorum and Gingrich.
Right. Both states assign their delegates proportionally. Romney’s lead may be cut by (just guessing) six or seven delegates between the two. Certainly not enough to matter.
But winning is not unimportant. Santorum and–more critically–the providers of Santorum’s money are going to be cheered.
Except for the states that are winner-take-all. But you have somewhat of a point: because I know that this race is overhyped, I’m not bothered to look up which states are winner-take-all
Alabama has some wacky system where there’s proportional delegates and then districts can divide their delegates between each district’s top two winners.
Mississippi is proportional unless someone gets a majority then it was WTA but that obviously didn’t happen.
Romney was supposedly trying harder in Alabama since there’s more to lose by being third place there than in Miss.
If the grand prize was just getting the nomination, I might agree that the only thing that matters is delegate count. But presumably, they need to think about the big boy election in November, and Romney is showing very little evidence that he can win where it counts, or excite more than just one voting block.
He’s going to need states like Michigan and Ohio in the general, but he won by the seat of his mom jeans in those primaries. He would probably like to retake VA for the Pubs, but he didn’t even look that good when it was just him and Ron Paul on the ballot. And the south? They do not like him down there one iota. He’s a rich, liberal, flip-flopping, unlikeable, awkward, New Englandy, effete culty Mormon. The only thing he has going down there is that he’s not a rich, liberal, socialist, likeable, smooth-talking, Chicago-y, effete culty Muslim black man. Now that may be enough to win him much of the south, but he is still struggling to really fire anybody up down there or most other places.
The thing with both Hillary and Barack in their primary battle is that both of those people fired up independents and the left. There was passion from the center on leftward for BOTH of them. People actually wanted them, yearned for them. There will be that again once Obama puts his campaign pants back on. But there will still be no passion on the right side of the political spectrum. Not for Mittens. Oh, he may win the delegate count. So he’ll have that going for him. Which is nice-- if that’s all you want from him.
I don’t think there’s much correlation on how a candidate does in a primary in a state and how they end up doing in the same state during the general election. At the end of the day, the people that show up to GOP primaries are mainly motivated Republican voters, they’ll all show up to the polls and vote for the GOP nominee in the General, regardless of who it is.
With the deep religious south siding with Ricky-poo that we’re no different than plants, women don’t need rights, yadda yadda, I think Romney would be stupid to pick anyone as a VP OTHER than Santorum.
I really don’t see any guarantee that Romney will get the needed delegates in a quick enough time, maybe leading to an open convention. This would be the smartest campaign move if they both desire the White House.
I also thought I read that a Santorum campaign advisor said they would back Romney if he got the nomination??
