At around 3 pm CNN announced the winner of the Kansas caucus was former Arkansas Governor Mike Huckabee. Dana Bash told the viewers that Huckabee will pick up thirty six delegates because of his victory. There are thirty nine delegates available in Kansas; three of them will be decided later as RNC delegates. Using the delegate count from MSNBC.com Huckabee has increased his delegate count for 231. This total is still lower than the 278 delegates that Romney had when he dropped out of the race this past Wednesday. Even with his sound defeat in Kansas John McCain now holds 723 delegates after picking up two of the super delegates. CNN analysts have formulated that even if Mike Huckabee wins every state left in the race by getting 50% of the vote John McCain will still be the nominee for the Republican Party. Romney saw that and dropped out of the race, but Huckabee said he will remain in the race until the winning number of delegates is achieved by any candidate.
By 8:40 pm, two democratic projections were made by both MSNBC and CNN. Washington State and Nebraska were both projected to be victories for Illinois Senator Barack Obama. Washington State has 78 normal pledged delegates with 18 super delegates for a total of 97. Nebraska has a total of 31 delegates with seven of those being super-delegates. At 10 pm MSNBC predicted that Barack Obama would win the state of Louisiana. This state has sixty six total delegates with ten super delegates. At 10:30 Obama spoke from Virginia where Democrats will vote on Tuesday. Obama is trying to rally around the big win he got today and to turn that into a big win in Virginia on Tuesday. CNN.com has projected that Obama will have gained seventy four delegates compared to Hillary Clinton’s thirty seven. Delegate counts on MSNBC (which do not include super delegates) are Obama with 935 delegates and Clinton with a total of 892. I left the super delegate count off because I do not feel that the super delegates will be allowed to decide who gets elected. This would leave a very sour taste in the mouths of people who voted in the democratic primaries. It would be similar to when in 2000 the Supreme Court appointed George W. Bush as President in the 5-4 decision of Gore vs. Bush. The people have to think that it was their vote that decided the primary I think the super delegates will decide to give support to the person with the delegate count lead, or who has gotten the most overall votes. This is necessary because people might not vote in the general election for the candidate if they feel that their vote was not considered in the electing of the candidate.
The last two races to be decided were the republican races in Louisiana and Washington. With a very slim margin of victory Mike Huckabee took the victory in the state of Louisiana, but CNN projects that it will not lead to any delegates because of the closeness of the results. It was also reported on Yahoo! News that Ron Paul will not be running as a member of the Green Party or as any other third party’s candidate. As of 1:30 in the morning the full results of the Washington caucus have not been fully processed. Currently, John McCain has a 2 percent lead over Mike Huckabee. This does not look good for Huckabee who has to win every primary and caucus by more than fifty percent to have a chance at being the Republican candidate. It looks like it will not be a matter of if, but when Mike Huckabee formally withdraws from the race.
-Ryan Damon
No comments:
Post a Comment