It looks like Romney was leading in the polls in Colorado, but Santorum was the likely winner in the others. Since there are no delegates and the demographics were favorable to Santorum if few people were going to show up in the first place, I’m not sure how much this hurts Romney. It doesn’t look good, but it’s also bad for his main competitor. The Maine caucuses are over the weekend, and then there’s no voting for 2 1/2 weeks.
I’m sucked in for the duration, mainly because Marley’s point that these results tonight will linger for three weeks.
CNN has not counted El Paso County (Colorado Springs - big for Santorum) or Jefferson Co (Romney, but not by a landslide from what I’m hearing). It will come down to Larimer Co. (Ft. Collins) and Weld Co. (Greeley) and possibly Mesa (Grand Junction).
I’m seeing a narrow win for Santorum statewide, which I never saw coming, but the miserable turnout isn’t a good indicator for either candidate. There is a lot of fresh snow on the ground on the Front Range and it it quite cold tonight.
CNN promising a deluge of new results as I speak.
You are evil and now have sucked me in as well. El Paso will definitely go for Santorum. I live in Jeffco, and would have predicted Romney for here. I can’t imagine Larimer and Weld going for Santorum, but then again, what do I know from Republicans there? All my friends in those counties are libs, but I wouldn’t have thought two university-related counties would go Santorum.
You say the turnout is miserable - what’s the numbers?
Ah, but the stuff that happens during those lulls in the action! The campaign press gets stir crazy, I think. The way I remember it, the “Hillary wants Obama to get shot” and the Rev. Wright things both happened during breaks in the '08 Democratic primaries.
Jefferson County, a Denver suburban county with 12% of the state’s population, came in for Romney, but only by a few hundred votes. It looks like it may end up as a romp for Santorum, maybe over 40% of the vote.
The only people happier than the Santorum folks tonight are all of the Democrats.
So what exactly was the purpose of these three contests today? Did Romney not bother to contest these or is there something meaningful to take away from this?
Is this just another expression of dissatisfaction with Romney by the party faithful? Or is there really a significant segment of Republican voters eager to drink the Santorum kool-aid? 
GOP Chairman says Santorum wins.
Wow.
Holy shit.
What is Romney going to do now?
Frank, you keep making much about how these events don’t allocate any RNC delegates, and I’m certainly with you on the weird thing with Missouri, but for the other two–isn’t that how all the caucuses work? The RNC delegates aren’t chosen the night of the caucus, but the people who will choose them are (well, with a few more layers of politicking in between). The delegates chosen tonight aren’t legally bound to vote for any particular candidate/RNC delegate, but I presume they’ve made their preferences known. In essence, the caucuses are people choosing who will hold their proxies in the smoke-filled room, and they’re going to pick representatives who at least claim to share their views.
tl;dr: It’s true that no RNC delegates are chosen tonight, but that doesn’t make the contests meaningless. (Except Missouri, which appears to be engaged in some sort of performance art.)
With 71% reporting in Colorado, here are the tallies:
Rick Santorum 13,032 37.7%
Mitt Romney 12,459 36.0%
Newt Gingrich 4,693 13.6%
Ron Paul 4,267 12.3%
Other 116 0.3%
No delegates will be awarded tonight, but it’ll keep Santorum in the race into March, and the reminder that nobody really likes Mitt all that much won’t go away for awhile.
Exploit his huge advantages in money and organization and try to nuke them so he can end the race on Super Tuesday.
In the tallies, Santorum’s lead is over 1,000 votes with 79% reporting.
He’ll win Massachusetts and Idaho, but I don’t think he has much organization in the other ST states. He and his people thought things would be over by tonight. I still think he’ll win the nomination, but he’s going to get hammered from the right for a month, and Obama doesn’t need to open his pocketbook during that time.
Missouri has a state law that requires they hold a primary in February. This year the RNC threatened to strip them of half of their delegates if they held their primary in February, so MO GOP tried to move it to March, but they never overturned the law. They have to have a primary by statute, but they aren’t going to award delegates.
There may be state and local primary races on the ballot. Someone from Missouri may be able to speak to that.
I would be extremely surprised if that’s the case. You raise all that money and build up your network so you can do things like competing in most of/all of the Super Tuesday states. Romney and Paul were the only ones who managed to get on the ballot in Virginia and that seems to me like it should be a good state for him. He’ll win Vermont, I’m sure. A win in Ohio would be huge and I think he’s at least competitive there. But I’m sure we will hear plenty of reporting about the organization on a state-by-state level.
They certainly hoped so, but I don’t know if they could have really expected a big field to be totally wiped out after a month of voting. Two of the Santorum wins tonight were foreseeable. Of Romney’s losses to this point, I think the only surprises were South Carolina and maybe Colorado.
“maybe Colorado”?
I don’t think there is a reputable organisation that saw this race as less than a 20 point win for Romney in Colorado.
By all familiar logic, Romney should beat the crap out of everyone on Super Tuesday. And he’ll probably win Ohio by carpet-bombing it with ads the way he did Florida, just to show he can win a Midwestern state where his father wasn’t governor, and he’ll win Virginia because only he and Ron Paul are on the ballot.
But I think there may be something to what Josh is saying, that Romney can’t be everywhere in the run-up to Super Tuesday, and even his PAC can’t spend $15M in every state - and Republican desire for someone, anyone, besides Romney may well cause him to lose a number of those other states.
You’ve probably seen more polls than I have. I only see Public Policy Polling, which had Romney by 10 points over Santorum. I’ll agree it’s an upset- that’s what the evidence says. I just don’t know how much weight to give to one poll by a Democrat-leaning group in a state where turnout seems to be down from 2008.
He’s definitely not going to win every state. I can’t see him winning Oklahoma or Alaska and I don’t know if he has a chance in Georgia, which happens to be the biggest prize that day. RealClearPolitics says Gingrich will win Georgia and Oklahoma easily. The upcoming states are here. I figure Romney wins Maine this weekend and Michigan at the end of the month and not Arizona. On Super Tuesday he could win Virginia, Ohio, Vermont and Massachusetts (those two are locks) for a start.
Be really embarrassing for Romney to lose Virginia since he and Ron Paul are the only GOP’ers on the ballot.
Edit: I see you noted that upthread. So that should be three “locks”
Every toxic cloud has a silver lining. You could look at this as populist, in a twisted sort of way, its “the people” telling their leadership to suck it. As odious as the participants may be, it is an example of the democracy we ought to be practicing. Doesn’t make it any less skeevy, but still…
Besides, it is a good thing if a party leadership gets taken out and parboiled, it encourages the others.