On this week’s Curmudgeon’s Corner Ivan and I flippantly predicted clean sweeps for both parties in today’s (Tuesday’s) primaries and caucuses. Obama winning Wisconsin and Hawaii and McCain winning Wisconsin and Washington State. (Hawaii’s Republican caucus isn’t until May, and there are no delegates at stake in Washington’s Democratic Primary).

But…

In Wisconsin a few hours before the polls open, Pollster.com has Obama only up by 7.0% which is decent, but some polls show it closer, and the difference between final polls and actual results has sometimes been bigger than that this year. The trend is in Obama’s direction though, so a Hillary win would be a big upset. But the gap really isn’t that huge. It COULD happen.

But look at this!! On the Republican side McCain leads Huckabee by 9.8%… which is a decent margin… but look at the slope of Huckabee’s trend line in the data from February. That Huckabee sure is making a nuicance of himself, ain’t he? I’m not saying he will win Wisconsin, but he sure is making a race out of it.

Meanwhile, there are no recent polls in Washington state, but Huckabee came within a hair of winning the caucuses here (and he is, I think, still asking for recounts and the like). Will that translate from caucus to primary? I dunno. But with the overall message being “McCain has it wrapped up”, plus the confusion from there being both a primary and a caucus here… I wouldn’t be surprised if McCain people stayed home, and Huckabee pulled out a win.

That is just too funny.

The math is still almost impossible for Huckabee here. But there is that little sliver of “almost”. But most (if not all) of the remaining Republican contests are proportional rather than winner-takes-all. Which I think means that Huckabee could actually win every race from here on out and McCain would STILL reach the magic number for the nomination first. But wouldn’t that be fun?

Go Huckabee Go!

As for Hawaii… I haven’t seen a single poll on Hawaii, and it is a caucus state anyway, so fairly unpredictable. The one thing I heard at one point was that Hillary was trying to make a contest out of it, and don’t be so sure that because Obama lived there as a young man that he would win it. So I really have no idea there. I’m guessing Obama here… but I’m really shooting in the dark with no data and basing it on the fact that EVERYBODY seems to assume it will go Obama… but I’m not sure if the talking heads have real data here either.

Anyway, 18 hours from now I will once again be glued to CNN, watching returns come in minute by minute. Fun stuff.

Just some minor delegate adjustments. Obama picks up 9 delegates somewhere or other. Clinton picks up 2. I haven’t been tracking things in such a way that it is easy for me to tell where these new delegates come from. I am guessing these are new superdelegate endorsements, plus probably the one additional delegate Clinton would have gotten from winning New Mexico.

On the Republican side, McCain got 3 more delegates from somewhere, a minor change.

Now, you may be asking… Didn’t Romney endorse McCain and “give” his delegates to McCain on Thursday? Well, he did endorse. He did encourage his delegates to vote for McCain. But fundamentally, in the end, these delegates are real people with free will, his statements don’t actually alutomatically change the votes for any of them. So how will this play out? Well, in many states, the final delegates aren’t actually selected yet, they have only actually done the first stages in the process. In those cases, how things work out in the end depends on the exact process each state has… which tends to be different in each state. In other cases, you actually have an actual human Romney delegate and they are now free to do what they want. They could still vote for Romney. They could vote for McCain. They could vote for Huckabee. Or even for someone who isn’t even running.

With all this mess I think what CNN should probably really do is recast all of the Romney delegates as uncommitted… in other words delegates for which we don’t know a preference yet… and then start researching the specifics of each and every delegate to be allocated and then start producing those results… but given that McCain probably has this wrapped up anyway… and that by the time we get to the convention it probably just won’t matter, even if they don’t just get all the delegates to flip and vote for McCain unanimously… they might not actually do this. I suspect they would if it looked like it might actually matter.

The approach CNN has actually taken… at least so far… is to just keep the Romney delegates as Romney delegates. They may still change that in the future. If so, of course I’ll make note of it.

As predicted by me (and almost everybody) Obama pulled ahead in the total delegate count based on the results of the Potomac Primaries. Frankly, at this point I know the pundits are all talking about how this may come down to the convention, and we may hit a situation where Obama is ahead in pledged delegates and Clinton potentially is put over the top by superdelegates and this results to all sorts of fun shenanegans. This would be fun, but I don’t think it will happen any more. I think Obama has passed Clinton and will just keep increasing the gap. I think even if the things continue to be close enough that the superdelegates are the deciding margin, Obama will have more than enough superdelegates to put him over the edge.

Now, we still have a long way to go between here and there. Maybe Ohio and Texas will go so heavily Clinton to put the brakes on the lead Obama builds in February and put Hillary back in the lead again. Hillary does seem to have a substantial lead in those states. And Pennsylvania feels like it might be Hillary country too at the moment. But that might change. And it might not be enough… Sigh, even as I type this I am becoming a bit less convinced of what I said in the first paragraph. Anyway, Obama is ahead now, but not actually over 50%. Right now we stand at Obama 49.98%, Clinton 48.95%, Edwards 1.07%.

That’s still pretty darn close. I guess there should be no egg counting yet. Lets see how Wisconsin and Hawaii go next week.

Oh yeah, and McCain continues to consolidate his lead on the way to 1191 delegates and the nomination. 379 delegates to go.

I forgot to ask before Super Tuesday, even though I knew I had readers in several Super Tuesday states… but I remembered for this one. Tomorrow are the primaries in Virginia, DC and Maryland. I know I have several readers in those areas. Do any of you have any thoughts? Are you planning to vote? If so which party? For who? Why? Do you have a sense of what your friends, coworkers and neighbors are thinking?

Jump in on the comments, or email me if that still doesn’t work for you.

Or just remain stoically silent if that is your preference. :-)

But comments are always appreciated.

Here are the updates to the delegate graphs based on the Results from the Saturday contests in Kansas, Louisiana, Nebraska and Washington State. Note however that I think some results from those contests have not been officially registered in these totals yet because while they are not 100% official yet.

So, Obama continues to close the gap with Clinton. Right now we are at 50.8% Clinton, 48.1% Obama, 1.2% Edwards. All the questions right now are about momentum. Obama “won” all the states (and the Virgin Islands) who played yesterday. Of course, delegates were split, this is not winner takes all. But he won by pretty convincing margins. We have Maine today, then Maryland, Virginia and DC on Tuesday. A week after that is Hawaii and Wisconsin. From what I’ve been hearing, Obama is favored in all of them, although Virginia and Hawaii are both places where Clinton is very competitive and could win. But Clinton is apparently banking on the big March 4th states, Ohio and Texas. The question is, if Obama keeps racking up wins between now and then, will Clinton start faltering in those states as well under the pure momentum of a winning Obama?

And then there is the superdelegate question. Right now if you only look at pledged delegates who have been “won” through primaries and caucuses, Obama is ahead 918-885-26. Clinton is still in the lead only due to the superdelegates who have already said they are supporting her which outnumber those who are supporting Obama by a decent margin. Will superdelegates start changing their minds if Obama has a clear lead in pledged delegates? Dunno. It could get interesting…

But… If Obama continues to win all the rest of the states in February, and continues to do so with not just close victories, but with significant margins… then the super delegates may well start to sway.

It is still a very interesting dynamic race.

And the Republicans. All the press has been about Huckabee’s big win on Saturday. OK. I think this is one of the places where CNN has not yet put in all of the delegates. They took some away from Romney which has appeared on Friday which were apparently an error. And Huckabee got a few, but just a few. So I guess I’ll withhold too much comment on Huckabee’s “big win”, as it may end up looking slightly bigger than the non-event it currently appears to be on the chart. BUt let me just say. Huckabee says: “I didn’t major in math, I majored in miracles.” Well, lets just say I think this is a perfect opportunity to show why math is usually superior to miracles. Maybe Huckabee is waiting for God to step in personally and strike McCain down… but that is the level of miracle Huckabee would really need here. I mean, it is certainly not mathematically IMPOSSIBLE yet for McCain not to win… but it really would take something HUGE for it to happen at this point. And hey, huge things do happen sometime, but…

On the other hand, I think the degree of the split in the Republicans might mean that they really SHOULD consider splitting the party. Huckabee’s level of support, specifically in some geographic areas, indicates I think that if you did have a split of the Republican party into McCain supporters and “everybody else”, then the new party WOULD be able to win actual electoral votes along with the two old parties. This would almost certainly throw the election into the house of representatives. And that would be awesome.

Please Huckabee… Please… forget the Republicans… run as a third party. You can do it! It would be fun! Really!