Chart from the Abulsme.com 2012 Republican Delegate Count Graphs page. When a candidate gets down to 0%, they have cinched the nomination. If they get up past 100%, they have been mathematically eliminated.

So. Maine. A few things to say before looking at any numbers here. Maine is another of those states where no actual delegates were designated by the initial caucuses there. Instead, two things happened. First, there was a straw poll. Second, there was the elections to the delegates of the next round. The second thing is actually related to who eventually gets delegates when all is said and done months from now. The first does not. At all. But it is what is reported because it is an easy to understand result. Also, it should be said that some precincts in Maine haven’t even had their caucuses yet. They don’t get to participate in the straw poll (because it is over) but they will get to vote on delegates and such. The “real” result tonight, as in many of the caucus states, is that no delegates at all have been allocated yet.

For this site, we use estimates from The Green Papers for delegates. These assume that the eventual delegate allocation will be proportional to the straw poll results, at least at first approximation. When later rounds of the delegate selection process happen, the numbers will get revised and may be quite different. As an example, the Ron Paul campaign is saying that they think in the end they will actually get the most delegates from Iowa, Minnesota and Colorado because they had their people stay around after the straw polls and actually run to be delegates to the later stages while the other campaigns for the most part ignored this. We shall see how that plays out. In the mean time, while one can look at only completely determined delegates like DCW does in their primary count, but we’ll use the projected eventual delegates from caucus states until better numbers are available later in the process…

Anyway, now on to the main event. Since the last update, we had the preliminary Maine results (estimated as described above), and Ron Paul gained one superdelegate. So for the day, Paul gains 9 delegates, Romney 8, Santorum 4 and Gingrich 1. So Paul wins the day, right? Or maybe like most people saying, it is a win for Romney since he got the most actual votes in the straw poll?

Wrong. The right answer is that after today EVERYBODY is further away from the nomination than they were yesterday. (Paul just lost the least ground.) Nobody got a high enough percentage of the delegates from today to be on track for getting to 1144 delegates before the convention. The delegate take is continuing to be split in such a way that nobody is taking a majority of the delegates.

In fact, with these results, Romney slips below 50% of the delegates allocated so far for the first time since his big delegate win from the winner take all contest in Florida. Prior to today, if he just continued getting delegates at the same percentage he had been so far, he would win the nomination. Since he is now below 50% again, that means he has to actually improve his performance above his historical levels (slightly) to get to 1144.

Of course we have another winner take all state (Arizona) coming up soon, and that may help Romney’s situation considerably if he wins there (as the current polls indicate is likely).

It is also worth pointing out though that even though Romney’s real position in the race (in terms of % of remaining delegates needed to win) was hurt today like everybody’s else’s… the gap between him and his closest competition (still Gingrich, despite Santorum closing rapidly) continues to grow. Romney now needs 50.1% of the remaining delegates to get to 1144. This is just slightly better than the 49.8% he has gotten so far. By comparison, Gingrich now needs 54.0% to catch up and actually get to 1144. This would be a huge change from the 17.9% he has managed so far.

As long as Romney is hovering around 50% of the delegates rather than consolidating and heading rapidly north of that number, we’re going to be hearing the talk about him not managing to get to 1144 and thus potentially ushering in the first brokered convention in decades. While this is an exciting possibility, the road there is still narrow, and Romney is still very much in shooting distance of an outright win.

If however as we hit the next few contents, we see his “% of remaining delegates needed to win” number staying above 50% and actually start to trend consistently UPWARD rather than flat or down… then that talk starts to be more of a real possibility.

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

So, Nevada is being very slow in providing results for their caucuses. I waited and waited, but as of 22:00 UTC, I decided it was time to go ahead and post today’s update even though the final delegate counts for Nevada are not yet fully determined. As of an update posted around 14 UTC, The Green Papers gives 12 delegates to Romney, 4 to Gingrich, 3 to Paul and 1 for Santorum… with 8 yet to be determined. These are estimates pending the final vote counts. I imagine I’ll be posting an update tomorrow with the disposition of at least some of those 8 delegates.

Based on the results so far though, despite actually getting some delegates this time since it was a proportional contest, only Romney actually did well enough to improve their overall position in the race. Romney needs a slightly smaller percentage of the remaining delegates to cinch the nomination that he did yesterday. For everybody else, even though they got some delegates, they did not get enough delegates to actually be catching up with Romney. They are only falling further behind.

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.