Here are the updates to the delegate graphs based on the Results from the Saturday contests in Kansas, Louisiana, Nebraska and Washington State. Note however that I think some results from those contests have not been officially registered in these totals yet because while they are not 100% official yet.
So, Obama continues to close the gap with Clinton. Right now we are at 50.8% Clinton, 48.1% Obama, 1.2% Edwards. All the questions right now are about momentum. Obama “won” all the states (and the Virgin Islands) who played yesterday. Of course, delegates were split, this is not winner takes all. But he won by pretty convincing margins. We have Maine today, then Maryland, Virginia and DC on Tuesday. A week after that is Hawaii and Wisconsin. From what I’ve been hearing, Obama is favored in all of them, although Virginia and Hawaii are both places where Clinton is very competitive and could win. But Clinton is apparently banking on the big March 4th states, Ohio and Texas. The question is, if Obama keeps racking up wins between now and then, will Clinton start faltering in those states as well under the pure momentum of a winning Obama?
And then there is the superdelegate question. Right now if you only look at pledged delegates who have been “won” through primaries and caucuses, Obama is ahead 918-885-26. Clinton is still in the lead only due to the superdelegates who have already said they are supporting her which outnumber those who are supporting Obama by a decent margin. Will superdelegates start changing their minds if Obama has a clear lead in pledged delegates? Dunno. It could get interesting…
But… If Obama continues to win all the rest of the states in February, and continues to do so with not just close victories, but with significant margins… then the super delegates may well start to sway.
It is still a very interesting dynamic race.
And the Republicans. All the press has been about Huckabee’s big win on Saturday. OK. I think this is one of the places where CNN has not yet put in all of the delegates. They took some away from Romney which has appeared on Friday which were apparently an error. And Huckabee got a few, but just a few. So I guess I’ll withhold too much comment on Huckabee’s “big win”, as it may end up looking slightly bigger than the non-event it currently appears to be on the chart. BUt let me just say. Huckabee says: “I didn’t major in math, I majored in miracles.” Well, lets just say I think this is a perfect opportunity to show why math is usually superior to miracles. Maybe Huckabee is waiting for God to step in personally and strike McCain down… but that is the level of miracle Huckabee would really need here. I mean, it is certainly not mathematically IMPOSSIBLE yet for McCain not to win… but it really would take something HUGE for it to happen at this point. And hey, huge things do happen sometime, but…
On the other hand, I think the degree of the split in the Republicans might mean that they really SHOULD consider splitting the party. Huckabee’s level of support, specifically in some geographic areas, indicates I think that if you did have a split of the Republican party into McCain supporters and “everybody else”, then the new party WOULD be able to win actual electoral votes along with the two old parties. This would almost certainly throw the election into the house of representatives. And that would be awesome.
Please Huckabee… Please… forget the Republicans… run as a third party. You can do it! It would be fun! Really!
