Wednesday, February 06, 2008

Presidential Race Far From Over

For the first time in a long time, Indiana's presidential primary in May may actually have some meaning, at least on the Democratic side. Sen. Barack Obama (D-IL) tallied up at least 13 wins on Super Tuesday compared to 8 wins for Sen. Hillary Clinton (D-NY). Although Clinton won the big prizes, including California, New York and New Jersey, the proportional allocation of delegates among the Super Tuesday states meant that Obama at least drew even with her in the all important delegate race. Clinton holds just a 79-vote lead of 829-750 in the delegate race. If you take away the super delegates, however, Obama has actually earned more delagates to date. There are still 463 undecided super delegates, who could become real power brokers at the Democratic convention this summer. This race may go all the way to the convention at the rate this race is going. It takes 2,025 delegates to win the Democratic nomination. Both candidates are shy of reaching the half-way mark.

On the Republican side, Sen. John McCain is still the clear frontrunner and, with former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee (R-AK) and former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney (R-MA) vowing to stay in the race, that should work to his advantage as the two continue splitting conservative votes and allowing narrow victories for McCain. McCain picked up 9 big wins on Super Tuesday, including California, New York, New Jersey, Illinois and Missouri. A southern strategy allowed Huckabee to pick up five wins in southern states, while Romney collected six wins largely in the west. McCain has a commanding 357-vote lead in the delegate race, collecting 597 to date compared to Romney's 240 and Huckabee's 178. That gets McCain to just slightly over half the number of delegates, 1,191, needed to win the nomination.

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

I decided to donate some money after hearing that Hillary is self funding.....it is almost impossible to get through to any of the web sites where you can donate money to Obame...they are swamped..........One has aleady raised almost six million dollars since the polls closed and the Billarys revealed that they had self funded five million dollars.

Anonymous said...

Poor Hillary. Such a shame she already tapped out all those big contributors she strong armed when she seemed inevitable.

Anonymous said...

Apparently the notion that Hillary is cash-strapped may be a ruse, according to this ABC story:
http://www.abcnews.go.com/Politics/Vote2008/story?id=4257358&page=1

My advice- keep trying to donate to Obama instead. It'll be worth the wait :)

Also, Romney's now dropped out, so that race is over, no matter how much noise the Rush Limbaugh wing of the Conservative ERRRRR, Authoritarian party may make from here on.

Biggest irony on the Democratic side: Hillary and Obama are their own superdelegates- and so is Bill Clinton.

Wouldn't it be the ultimate irony if they went into the convention at a dead tie, and Bill wound up being the tiebreaker...