Re: Edging Towards the Inevitable

Here is the delegate total, according to CNN (including North Dakota, whose delegates according to the RNC are unbound), from last night's Super-Tuesday primaries:

Mitt Romney 200
Rick Santorum 73
Newt Gingrich 67
Ron Paul 24

Also, according to the RNC website, there were no winner-take-all races last night. A majority of states allocated A) a portion of their delegates according to Congressional district-by-district results and B) another portion of their delegates according to the statewide result, usually proportionally, to every candidate who bettered a preset vote threshold. As a result of these rules, there is not an overwhelming amount of distortion between last night's delegate result and last night's popular result, though there is some, mostly as a result of some Congressional districts being winner-take-all, which gave Mitt Romney a 26-13 edge over Rick Santorum in Ohio, despite the popular result being nearly tied. (Also, you could cite the 43 delegates Romney received from Virginia as an anomaly, as Mitt Romney and Ron Paul were the only candidates on the ballot there, though it is equally fair to point out that if Rick Santorum and Newt Gingrich wanted to win delegates in Virginia, they could have gotten on the ballot too).

I haven't chosen a particular candidate to support in this year's GOP primary (even in the Raimondoian sense, where you support someone without endorsing them), and I know the conventional buzz of late has focused on finding second-order reasons why Romney's victories show that his position is not very strong, but if you are looking at what ultimately matters for winning the Republican nomination, Mitt Romney has won solid victories in the past two weeks, across a pretty fair sampling of Republican voters in the nation as a whole.