With Michigan, South Carolina, Nevada and Florida as rest stops on the way to Super Tuesday, and with the collective credibility of pundits and pollsters shattered after Obama's staggering, run-away win in New Hampshire, it has begun to dawn on the commentariat that they have no idea what is going on in the presidential race, and that voters may be troublingly insistent on casting ballots for whomever they want regardless of the results predicted by the pros.
Rudy Giuliani is expected to win New Jersey and New York on Super Tuesday, February 5, 2008, and those states award their delegates on a winner-take-all basis.
John McCain will likely win Arizona, which is another winner-take-all state, giving him 53 delegates on Super Tuesday.
Mike Huckabee should win the winner-take-all state of Georgia, to earn him 72 points on Super Tuesday.
Mitt Romney is strong in the winner-take-all states of Massachusetts, Vermont and Utah, which yield a total of 96 delegates.
Fred Thompson can be expected to win the winner-take-all state of Tennessee, assuming he wins a majority of the votes, for a total of 55 delegates.
Total winner take out numbers
Rudy Giuliani 153
Mitt Romney 96
Mike Huckabee 72
Fred Thompson 55
John McCain 53
We can confidently look forward to waking up on Wednesday February 6 with every GOP candidate claiming some victories and many delegates, and the outline of a convention fight looming in the not-far-off distance.
No one is headed for the sidelines soon, not even Fred with the fewest votes cast in the first two contests, and certainly not Romney with the most votes and delegates as of today. Even a second place in Michigan --another open primary like Iowa and New Hampshire in which the Republican preference is obscured by the votes of Independants and even Democrats-- won't sideline Romney, despite the demands of Manhattan-Beltway scribblers and talkers. Romney raised more than $5 million the day after a second place finish in New Hampshire, and the campaign was energized by the obvious loyalty of the base Romney has built over the past year. That base will harvest delegates from now until St. Paul and put Romney in a commanding position at the convention if he simply stays in the game, and may possibly deliver the nomination if he surprises anywhere between now and the end of voting in Texas and Ohio on March 4.
But what about the McCain surge and his big win in New Hampshire? "John McCain will not get the base of the Republican Party," former Pennsylvania Senator Rick Santorum told me this week, and Santorum proceeded to list the ways in which McCain has rejected conservative policies over the years:
John McCain was the guy who was working with Ted Kennedy to drive it down our throats, and lectured us repeatedly about how xenophobic we were, lectured us, us being the Republican conference, about how wrong we were on this, how we were on the wrong side of history, and that you know, this is important for his…because having come from Arizona, knowing the strength of the Hispanic community, that we were going to be seen as racists, and he wasn’t going be part of that, that he was not a racist, and that if we were for tougher borders, it was a racist thing. Look, John McCain looks at things through the eyes, on these kind of domestic policy issues, looks at it through the eyes of the New York Times editorial board, and accepts that predisposition that if you are not, if you stand for conservative principles, there’s some genetic defect.
and
[McCain's] not with us on almost all of the core issues of…on the economic side, he was against the President’s tax cuts, he was bad on immigration. On the environment, he’s absolutely terrible. He buys into the complete left wing environmentalist movement in this country. He is for bigger government on a whole laundry list of issues. He was…I mean, on medical care, I mean, he was for re-importation of drugs. I mean, you can go on down the list. I mean, this is a guy who on a lot of the core economic issues, is not even close to being a moderate, in my opinion. And then on the issue of, on social conservative issues, you point to me one time John McCain every took the floor of the United States Senate to talk about a social conservative issue. It never happened. I mean, this is a guy who says he believes in these things, but I can tell you, inside the room, when we were in these meetings, there was nobody who fought harder not to have these votes before the United States Senate on some of the most important social conservative issues, whether it’s marriage or abortion or the like. He always fought against us to even bring them up, because he was uncomfortable voting for them. So I mean, this is just not a guy I think in the end that washes with the mainstream of the Republican Party. Continued... |