The American Spectator

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The Nation's Pulse

(Page 2 of 2)

9:00 PM

Arizona, New York -- More winner-take-all victories for McCain, with 50 and 87 delegates determined by the election. New York will also send 14 officially unpledged delegates, and Arizona will also send 3 unpledged. McCain can probably count those toward his total, too.

10:00 PM

Utah -- Romney easily wins 36 delegates in the only winner-take-all state that he can count on.

11:00 PM

California -- You can think of California as 54 winner-take-all contests. The statewide winner gets 11 delegates, and the winner of each of 53 congressional districts gets 3 delegates. The polls show Romney surging in the Golden State. But it matters quite a bit where he's surging.

Who Knows When

West Virginia -- The first result of the day will probably come out of the Republican state presidential convention here, which will send 18 delegates to the national convention (another 9 will be selected by primary vote on May 13). Delegates to the state convention were elected in county conventions; sizeable numbers of them are committed to Mitt Romney, Mike Huckabee, and Ron Paul, but many were either elected as uncommitted or as supporters of a candidate who has dropped out of the race. John McCain has only one committed delegate attending the state convention. Romney is the favorite here, but a Huckabee upset isn't impossible.

Montana -- Montana will be holding county committee caucuses, open to about 1,800 Republicans, many of whom have signed up for precinct jobs just to earn the privilege of participating in this caucus. The winner -- no one seems to have any idea who that will be, though Romney has been organizing in Montana the longest -- gets all 25 of Montana's delegates.

North Dakota -- North Dakota's 26 delegates will be allocated proportionally based on the results of the caucuses here (unless a candidate gets more than two thirds of the vote, in which case it becomes winner-take-all). There hasn't been any polling done here.

Alaska -- Though the Alaska district caucuses are getting lumped in with the rest of the the Super Tuesday states in much of the news coverage, they don't actually select the delegates to the national convention. What they do is select the delegates to the state convention, who in turn select the delegates to the national convention. Delegates elected today may or may not be pledged to a candidate.

Minnesota -- Like the district caucuses in Alaska, the Minnesota precinct caucuses don't directly determine delegates to the national convention. Delegates will be elected to the "Basic Political Organization Unit" Conventions, the BPOU conventions elect delegates to both the congressional district conventions and the state convention, and those conventions select delegates to the national convention. (Got all that?) There will be an advisory presidential preference straw poll during today's caucuses -- the one poll that's been taken recently shows a lead for McCain -- but it's not immediately clear how that will translate to the delegate count.

To win the nomination, a candidate needs 1,191 delegates locked up. McCain currently has 102, Romney has 69, and Huckabee has 27. (All of these numbers will be a bit higher if sanctions the RNC imposed on states for holding early contests are not enforced.)

There's no doubt that John McCain will have a plurality of delegates after today. The only question is whether his lead will be so great that he can't be caught.

topics:
John McCain, Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, Law, Alaska