This is the website of Abulsme Noibatno Itramne (also known as Sam Minter).
Posts here are rare these days. For current stuff, follow me on Mastodon
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A big update on the Republican side at 9:00 UTC. My headline just mentions McCain and Huckabee because they crossed arbitrary lines, but McCain’s drop is paired with a rise for Romney as well as Huckabee. At this hour we now have McCain 57.4%, Romney 25.0%, Huckabee 16.0%, Paul 1.6%. (That 25.0% for Romney is actually 24.975%, so he hasn’t actually gone above 25% yet.)
So maybe I spoke a little prematurely about just how unrealistic Romney or Huckabee catching McCain is. I don’t think I did actually, I think my statement will end up being accurate, but let me let the rest of the results finish coming in before I open my mouth again. :-)
All the proportional states and their slow counting… I’m ready for my instant gratification damn it! Hurry up with the counting!
Slowly but surely over the course of the evening, Obama’s percentage of the delegate total has been increasing. It just went over 45% for the first time. Yesterday the gap between Clinton and Obama was 17.8%. As of right now (just after 8:30 UTC) that gap has narrowed to 7.1%. And the night is not quite done yet, they are still counting up delegates and it looks like that will continue for hours more. But right now we have Clinton 52.6%, Obama 45.5%, Edwards 1.9%.
The spinmeisters are going nuts on all sides trying to make it seem like the results are stongly in favor of their candidate. But it is looking like the overall narrative that emerges will hopefully be a better reflection of reality… which is that the gap between these candidates has been narrowed significantly (it will be a bunch more hours before we know exactly where it ends up) and this is basically a completely dead even race right now. Any advantage either candidate has after today will be slight.
So at least the next month of primaries and caucuses will “matter”. (Including the Washington State caucuses where I am.) And we get another month of delegate counting as each contest passes by. After tonight is finally done, next stop is Saturday. Then Sunday. Then Tuesday.
This will be a busy week.
But nothing else in the calendar will be anywhere near as big as tonight. From now on it is a long series of individual spaced out events. (With a few clumps, but small clumps.)
And this is a good thing, I can’t do that many all nighters any more! :-)
I definitely am getting tired, I missed that at the 7:30 UTC update Huckabee fell below 15% again by a small margin. At that time the “score” was McCain 62.4%, Romney 21.5%, Huckabee 14.8%, Paul 1.3%. In the last hour CNN hasn’t made any further updates to those numbers.
I’ve also been getting annoyed with the talking heads on TV who are trying to claim that this is now a two way race with McCain and Huckabee, or that all three candidates are still in this race. I’ll wait to post something with the actual numbers until we have pretty final delegate counts, but suffice it to say that the mathematics is just against it. The percentages that Huckabee and Romney would need to catch McCain are just completely unrealistic. The only way it could happen is something completely drastic and unexpected… such as McCain having a health crisis and having to drop out.
Anyway… I’ll talk about this again sometime after the numbers are final.
Things are moving slowly, so I’ll do 5% boundaries now too. :-)
Huckabee just went over 15%. On the Republican side we are now at McCain 61.2%, Romney 22.1%, Huckabee 15.3% and Paul 1.4%.
Yes, Paul got some more delegates and went above 1% again.
On the Dem side, although Obama went above 40% and Clinton dropped below 55% when we first started the evening, nobody has passed a 5% line since then. Oh, except Edwards, who fell below 5% at my 3:00 UTC update. In the last hour or so both Clinton and Obama have been rising while Edwards drops. New totals are Clinton 54.1%, Obama 43.5%, Edwards 2.4%.
PS: I know that most likely none of my readers at all are following these updates as I make them, and by morning the blow by blow of the evening will be irrelevant and only the final totals will matter, but I’m having fun, so I don’t care. :-) I am getting tired though. But this is likely to go straight through to morning. I’ll have to decide if at some point I want to stop. I’ve got at least a few hours left in me though.
OK, so Huckabee reversed things in the last half hour and got himself a bunch of delegates. He’s back over 10% now. So it is now McCain 61.9%, Romney 23.0%, Huckabee 14.2% and Paul 0.9%.
And that brings up another milestone. I was only going to post when candidates passed 10% marks, or each other, but this is another important one. Ron Paul just fell below 1% of the delegates. Poor Ron Paul.
Meanwhile, CNN hasn’t updated delegate totals on the Democratic side in an hour and a half. WTF is up with that?
This half hour (4:00 UTC) Huckabee just dropped below 10% of the delegates. He seemed all excited about his wins tonight, but the truth is that he is just falling further behind. He may be staying in it to the end and all, but… he just ain’t doing well. At the moment in terms of delegate totals we have McCain 66.3%, Romney 23.4%, Huckabee 9.3%, Paul 1.0%.
Anyway, on the other side the Democratic side is frustrating. A lot of states have been called already, but actual delegate counts are just slowly dribbling in as the evening progresses because of the fact that delegates are allocated by district and so results from each district are really needed before anybody can say anything. For instance, in the last half hour several states were called, but there were no changes to the delegate count. So the delegate balance is moving very slowly, not by big leaps. Right now in terms of delegate totals we have Clinton 54.4%, Obama 40.9%, Edwards 4.7%… which isn’t that far from where we were yesterday (55.8% to 38.0% to 6.3%).
Obviously those totals are expected delegates from the whole race so far, not just delegates from tonight.
As of this half hour, McCain is now over 60% of the estimated delegates on CNN’s page. 66.0% to be exact. If this continues it is going to be a bloodbath.
On the Democratic side Clinton yesterday was at 55.8% of delegates. By 1:30 UTC she had dropped to 52.9%. As of 2:30 UTC (a few minutes ago) she was back up to 54.2%. (Meanwhile Obama had gone from 38.0% to 41.6% then back down to 40.8%.)
Although I will continue with the once daily updates of my delegate graphs and will do the one data point for today after it looks like most of today’s counts are in, I’m also updating a spreadsheet with graphs of the changes today in half hour increments. (I started at 1:30 UTC, I’m kind of annoyed I didn’t think of it in time to do updates at 0:00, 0:30 and 1:00.) If anybody cares to look, the spreadsheet is here.
I think until we get to the end of the evening, I’ll only be posting here when there are significant events in those rankings. (Like McCain passing 50% and then 60%.)
I won’t update the delegate graphs until pretty late tonight I don’t think, but just checking totals at the moment, McCain has topped 50% of delegates for the first time in CNN’s count based on the (very limited) results so far.
And then really it will be it. Last night I saw some analysis (I forget where so can’t link to it, sorry) where someone had basically done the math based on a range of likely outcomes on the Democratic side and determined that absent a complete switch to one candidate or the other having an absolutely commanding advantage in every contest from here on out (or one of them drops out), we will end up with a situation where in the end at the convention the winner *will* be determined by how the superdelegates line up. Neither candidate will have enough delegates from primaries and caucuses to win. So it will be all about how the superdelegates end up breaking. So far Hillary has a big advantage amoungst superdelegates. But superdelegates are people and will be subject to lobbying and changing their minds up until the actual moment of the first vote at the convention.
And that could be fun.
Just realized I completely forgot the Republicans. Romney might get enough delegates to keep this going a bit longer (especially if he wins California), but I think McCain will win big enough that the race will essentially be over. The question will just be if Romney wants to fight on a few more weeks in the hopes that there will be a massive last minute swing in his direction. And that’s all for that.
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