Super Tuesday Aftermath

Here’s a quick rundown of the Super Tuesday results.  Mitt Romney won six states (Alaska, Idaho, Massachusetts, Ohio, Virginia, and Vermont), Rick Santorum won three states (North Dakota, Oklahoma, and Tennessee), Newt Gingrich won one state (Georgia), and Ron Paul won no states. 

See below for a table of the results, both in terms of vote percentages and delegates acquired.  I’ve also provided the approximate vote total from each state and the Associated Press delegate count going into Super Tuesday.  99% of precincts were reported as of this writing in all states except North Dakota (76%), Idaho (89%), and Tennessee (96%).  Also, not all delegates may have been awarded yet.

Note that Virginia was a battle between Romney and Paul because nobody else made the ballot.  Also, note that Massachusetts and Virginia were winner-take-all states.  These points account for the concentrations of zeroes in certain areas.  As a quick aside, in the old days of computer programming, we would have left those zeroed cells blank instead of putting in a zero to conserve memory.  I’m talking decades ago here, which is an eternity in technological terms. Anyway, back to the topic at hand. 

We can clearly see where the failure of Santorum and/or Gingrich to get on the Virginia ballot is a big deal.  They basically gave Romney 41 easy delegates.  When you really think about it, however, it’s potentially an 82-delegate swing if one of those two wins the state instead because it would mean 41 less delegates for Romney and 41 more delegates for Santorum/Gingrich. 

One can argue that because Gingrich and/or Santorum didn’t have to worry about Virginia, they could allocate more resources to other states and win more delegates that way.  I think that’s pure nonsense, mainly because I highly doubt either would have been able to use those resources to engineer an 82-delegate swing anywhere.  Also, because it was just Romney versus Paul, most of the anti-Romney vote probably stayed home.  We’ll obviously never know for sure, but I think Virginia would have been in play for Gingrich/Santorum if one of them was there (but probably not both).

As you know, I’ve advocated looking at the race not as Romney-Santorum-Gingrich-Paul, but Romney-Paul-anti-Romney.  It’s obvious why that matters in winner-take-all states, but I haven’t really touched upon it in states that award delegates based on who wins certain districts (and possibly also who wins the popular vote of the entire state).  There are numerous districts in numerous states that ended up going to Romney because anti-Romney was divided among Gingrich and Santorum.  The combined anti-Romney would have won. 

Maybe one of those split states awards more delegates to anti-Romney and less delegates to Romney not just based on a new winner for the state, but a new winner within state districts.  Said another way, maybe Ohio, which awarded 35 delegates to Romney and 21 to Santorum, instead awards not just 35 to Santorum and 21 to Romney, but maybe 40 to Santorum and 16 to Romney.  As with Virginia above, it wouldn’t just be an x-vote swing, but a 2x-vote swing.  We’d have to dig into aggressively into intrastate data, but I suspect we really would see it.   

The results were largely in line with expectations and I don’t see anything that really surprises me.  It showed us, once again, that if you want Romney to win, you want Gingrich to stay in the race as long as possible, but if you want Romney to lose, you want Gingrich to go.  Overall, I’d say Romney has widened his lead in the delegate hunt, but this was hardly a knock-out punch to the anti-Romney crowd.

There are a few small races coming up soon.  The Kansas caucus is this weekend, along with Wyoming, Guam, the Virgin Islands, and the Northern Mariana Islands (which is interesting because Guam and these islands aren’t actual states).  Alabama and Mississippi are up on Tuesday.  Personally, I don’t expect Romney to fair well in any of these states except possibly Wyoming.  This will be a mild week and weekend compared to what we’ve recently had.  I may even be able to get some non-GOP primary posts in sometime soon.