Chart from the Abulsme.com 2012 Republican Delegate Count Graphs page.

Pulling ahead in just the last few days before the South Carolina Primary, Gingrich won a commanding victory in South Carolina. Although the congressional district level results won’t be final for awhile now, it looks like Gingrich will end up with 23 of South Carolina’s 25 delegates. Romney gets the remaining 2 delegates, plus he picked up another superdelegate since our last update.

Fundamentally, looking at our “% of Remaining Delegates needed to win” chart gives the same story that is the big narrative tonight. This was a very bad day for Romney. Romney is still in the best position to win. He is still ahead in delegates. (33 Romney delegates to Gingrich’s 28 by our count which uses data from both The Green Papers and Democratic Convention Watch.) But now instead of being way off on his own, with a much better position than all of his competitors, who were getting worse off by the day, he is now joined by Gingrich, who has broken out of the pack of “not-Romneys” and is now nipping at Romney’s heels. Meanwhile, Paul and Santorum fall even further behind since they got no delegates at all out of South Carolina.

The next big contest is Florida of course, with 50 delegates at stake. Florida is a winner take all state. If Romney wins Florida, he pulls WAY ahead again, and pushes Gingrich back into the background. If Gingrich wins, then he suddenly will take a fairly significant lead himself, and we will need to start taking a much closer look at the rest of the calendar…

Since this was a big day, two other views as well… first the race as % of delegates captured so far…

Romney had been over 50% for a little while. No longer.

And finally, the plain old “Total Delegates” chart…

Gingrich’s good night is particularly striking in this last one, but I think it actually makes it look like a better night than it really was.

I think the first of these three charts is the most indicative of where the race really stands, but the other two are interesting views as well. But looking at % needed to win really gives you a sense of how close we are (or not) to wrapping things up. Numbers close to 50 as we have today still indicate a lot is possible. As we get candidates starting to head rapidly toward 100 (where they are mathematically eliminated) or starting to dive down toward zero (where they cinch the nomination) we will see very clearly the state of the race.

For the second time this election season we have delegate updates. This time of course from New Hampshire. As before, I am going to concentrate here on the graph above, which is the percent of the outstanding delegates the candidate needs to get in order to wrap up the nomination. For more common charts, like total delegates and the like, go to my full 2012 Republican Delegate Count Graphs page.

For this chart, remember that DOWN is better. When a candidate gets down to zero, they have wrapped up the nomination. If they go up past 100 then they have been mathematically eliminated from winning absent delegates changing their votes. Basically, you can look at this as measuring how close they are to winning. The lower the line, the closer they are to winning.

Bottom line here is that only one candidate actually improved their overall position based on the results in New Hampshire. That candidate is of course Romney. As you can see above, his percentage needed dropped slightly. This means the bar he needs to pass in all future contests was just LOWERED a bit, so his road to the nomination is easier. Everybody else in the race, even some others who increased the percentage of delegates they have, didn’t get ENOUGH… so their road to the nomination gets harder after this, not easier.

Of course this lines up nicely with the dominant narrative at this point. This was a big success for Romney, everybody else muddles along. The standard narrative is moving rapidly toward inevitability though. This is of course based on momentum and how spin following each contest effects the next elections, etc. From a pure delegate count point of view though, we just are not there yet. Only 1.6% of the available delegates have been awarded at this point… and that is only if you count provisional estimates of delegates from Iowa (they haven’t REALLY been allocated yet). The candidates are still close enough together in delegate count, and there are still so many delegates yet to allocate, that *if* the kind of volatility in support that happened during the pre-primary season were to continue, with either Romney collapsing, or another candidate having a “surge”, or if the dynamics start to shift as candidates drop out, there is still plenty of room for non-Romneys to make a move here.

Having said that, honestly, it does still look like Romney is going to quickly run away with this unless something happens to change the dynamics of the race VERY SOON. We just can’t actually say that from the numbers yet. Right now (estimates via The Green Papers) we have Romney with 13 delegates, followed by Paul 9, Santorum 6, Gingrich 4, Perry 3 and Huntsman 2. With 2249 more delegates yet to be determined. So a long way to go yet.

Given however that as of today for the first time, we actually have a delegate leader in the Republican campaign, I’ve started to put together my General Election Electoral College models based on state by state polling assuming we are going to end up with Obama vs Romney. Look for those to debut here before the end of the month.