Super Tuesday

             A lot has happened since my last post. Super Tuesday has come and gone, along with eight more elections afterword.  As the delegate count stands right now, Romney has 496, Santorum has 236, Gingrich has 141, and Paul has 66. So while Romney still maintains a significant lead after Super Tuesday, the race is far from over. Out of the 18 contests since my last blog post, 10 of them were actual primaries. This means that they are more binding than the caucuses. Mitt Romney won 11 of the 18 elections in Ohio, Massachusetts, Virginia, Idaho, Alaska, Vermont, Guam, Northern Marianas, Virgin Islands, Hawaii, and American Samoa. He was awarded a proportion of delegates in all of the other elections that he did not win outright. Rick Santorum won 6 elections: Tennessee, North Dakota, Oklahoma, Kansas, Alabama, and Mississippi. Newt Gingrich won one state, his home state of Georgia. Ron Paul failed to win in any of the previously mentioned contests, although he did manage to pick up a few delegates due to the proportional system.

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If Super Tuesday showed anything, it’s that the race for Republican Presidential Nominee has become a two-man field. While both Gingrich and Paul are still running their campaigns, neither of them has a real chance of winning. The two candidates it really comes down to are Romney and Santorum. While Santorum won fewer states than Romney, he has been carrying momentum for quite some time, and it doesn’t look like that will be changing any time soon. However, in terms of delegate count, Romney is by far closer to the winning delegate count than Santorum. In order to win the nomination, a candidate needs 1,144 delegates. Romney has nearly 500 delegates, while Santorum has less than 250. Only time will tell, but unless Santorum starts coming in first in a few more states, Romney looks to be the nominee, reaffirming the early assumption.

The next contests are in Missouri, Puerto Rico, and Illinois, on the 17^th, 18^th, and 20^th respectively. None of these are big-ticket states, but they will help either narrow or widen the existing delegate count gap.