Tell It Like It Is
I don’t have much to say about the Colorado, Missouri, and Minnesota Edition of the GOP clown car, especially since there weren’t any delegates actually at stake – except in abstract terms. The only update I have is that Mitt Romney seems to have gained a new SuperDelegate (now having 17).
Note that zero national convention delegates are allocated during the Colorado/Minnesota Precinct Caucuses – national convention delegates are first elected in March.)
(click here to continue reading Colorado Republican Delegation 2012.)
and Missouri:
Missouri Republican non-binding Primary. Today’s primary has no effect on delegate allocation.
(click here to continue reading Missouri Republican Delegation 2012.)
Inviting Entrance
Dave Weigel writes:
My old colleague Jack Shafer once praised “horse race” coverage of presidential politics. “Every political reporter I know,” he wrote, “yearns to cover a deadlocked presidential convention.” It’s true. So why has every single primary spawned dull, topsy-turvy—and ultimately wrong—stories about how it “Marked the End” of one candidate or another? Tuesday’s caucus-goers have done us a real solid, forcing the media to confront the truth: The Republican race will last until April at the very least. And it’s in everybody’s interest—Candidates! Voters! Reporters! Whatever David Gergen is!—that it drags on that long or longer.
We know the race will last to April thanks to pure, heartless algebra. The 2012 Republican nominee will need to win 1,144 delegates. The number of delegates semi-officially pledged to candidates as I type this out: 161. The number of delegates that will be pledged by the end of Super Tuesday, one month from now: 662. Rick Santorum could take every single delegate away from Mitt Romney (Good luck in Massachusetts!) and be barely halfway to the nomination.
It feels slower than the last primary. Because it’s much, much slower. A catastrophic and months-long leap-frog competition forced 21 states into 2008 Super Tuesday primaries or caucuses. By Feb. 5, 2008, 1,069 of the GOP’s delegates—41 percent of the total—had been chosen. It was a fluke, no one wanted it to happen again, but it turned out like a childhood trauma in reverse. So much fun was had, the “this can wrap up in a hurry” concept stuck around.
(click here to continue reading Why the Republican primary will not end anytime soon – Slate Magazine.)
Options
Nate Silver:
Mr. Romney has had deep problems so far with the Republican base, going 1-for-4 in caucus states where turnout is dominated by highly conservative voters. Mr. Romney is 0-for-3 so far in the Midwest, a region that is often decisive in the general election. He had tepid support among major blocks of Republican voters like evangelicals and Tea Party supporters, those voters making under $50,000 per year, and those in rural areas. Instead, much of his support has come from the wealthy areas that Charles Murray calls Super ZIPs — few of which are in swing states in the general election.
Meanwhile, polls show that a large number of Republicans have tepid enthusiasm for their field. And this has been reflected in the turnout so far, which is down about 10 percent from 2008 among Republican registrants and identifiers.
These are not the hallmarks of a race with a dominant candidate. Nor, even, of a race with a candidate like John Kerry, the best of a somewhat weak lot of Democrats in 2004, but one whom the party settled upon fairly quickly.
(click here to continue reading G.O.P. Race Has Hallmarks of Prolonged Battle – NYTimes.com.)