Ha!! Santorum wins three states tonight! None of these states officially select delegates tonight, and we’re still waiting on delegate estimates from the two where the results today even have any effect at all on the eventual delegates, but Romney will still be ahead on that front by a decent margin. The narrative will still be all about how much trouble Romney is in. He will still win, but the news gods are with us, and maybe this will stay interesting a little while longer. Fun Fun Fun!
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Alex has been really into playing with his toy trains for quite a few months now. Spending hours doing it almost every day, building elaborate arrangements of tracks and blocks, pulling really long trains, asking me to “Play Thomas” or “Play Hiro” under his direction. But recently he has found something new and wonderful… Videos of real trains on YouTube. The video above is one I started to take of him watching one and getting excited. (He had been jumping up and down and yelling, then I started recording and started it over, which he wasn’t excited about.) He noticed me videoing, told me “NO!” and took my phone, and started recording the video off the computer screen. In all he recorded almost 15 minutes of train videos before I reclaimed my phone. The video only contains the highlights. :-) Especially when it is late and he is getting sleepy, but other times as well, he will now ask for “Train Videos“, or sometimes more specifically “Blue Train!“. On the computer he will happily watch one after another after another, but he hasn’t quite mastered the trackpad (or mouse) yet, so when a video ends, he looks through the pictures for the related videos that come up at the end, and points at the one he wants, and one of us has to start it. But… but… with the YouTube app on the iPhone, he is completely proficient at navigating on his own. Start it off with a search of “trains” or “blue trains” or something similar, and he will be enthralled and fully engrossed and fascinated moving from one video to another to another, exploring the world of YouTube train videos… seemingly for hours… certainly long enough for an hour or so long drive home from day care.
Map from the Abulsme.com 2012 Electoral College Prediction page. And so, in the first update since I began tracking the general election matchup between Obama and Romney, we have a change in the status of one of the states. A new poll in Montana brings my five poll average (seeded with 2004 and 2008 results) under 10%, which moves Montana from Strong Romney to Weak Romney. Now, my average still has Romney ahead by 9.7%, which is still almost strong… his lead would need to fall below 5% for me to consider the state a toss up, and it is a long way from that. But still, movement! State by State polls are still relatively infrequent at this point… a few per week… so change will be slow. Plus the focus hasn’t shifted to the general election campaign yet. By the time we get to the summer and fall, things will accelerate rapidly. Below see the chart of where this puts us in terms of the electoral college. Montana only has 3 electoral votes, so it is just a minor movement on the upper line, which represents how many more electoral votes Obama would get than he needed to tie if he won all of the states he is ahead in, all the too close to call “lean” states and Romney’s weak states. This is of course a highly unlikely scenario. For the most part likely outcomes “if the election was held today” are between the dark blue and dark red lines below. A better way to think about the “weak” states is that they are states that the candidate has a healthy lead in, but not so big a lead that they can ignore the state completely, as they could become vulnerable if the other candidate gets on a roll and gets a major nationwide surge in the polls. (Meanwhile, the “strong” states can indeed be ignored almost completely, and almost all the campaigning, advertising, and dollars will be pouring into the “lean” states.)
Chart from the Abulsme.com 2012 Electoral College Prediction page. Lines represent how many more electoral votes a candidate has than is needed to tie under several different scanarios. And of course a final reminder… none of this represents an actual prediction for the results in November. This represents the state of things NOW, as imperfectly determined by still very sparse polling. Between now and November, quite a lot will happen, and the states will ebb and flow between categories as events unfold. This is why these charts show changes over time rather than just the snapshot of “now”. The goal is to show how the situation changes over the 10 months (and a few days) of the 2012 campaign season.
Chart from the Abulsme.com 2012 Republican Delegate Count Graphs page. When a candidate gets down to 0%, they have cinched the nomination. If they get up past 100%, they have been mathematically eliminated. Today’s update is just Romney picking up another superdelegate. This of course slightly improves his situation, and slightly hurts everybody else.
Chart from the Abulsme.com 2012 Republican Delegate Count Graphs page. So, we now have the rest of the results from Nevada. Compared to the update yesterday… everybody gains 2 more delegates… splitting the 8 that were remaining after yesterdays update evenly. That brings us for a total in Nevada of 14 for Romney, 6 for Gingrich, 5 for Paul and 3 for Santorum. On our nifty “% of delegates remaining needed to win” we actually have the situation between yesterday and today of EVERYBODY moving a bit further away from the nomination than they were yesterday. This is because with the even split in delegates, given where everybody started, nobody actually exceeded the percentages they needed to stay on track for cinching. But if you consider Nevada as a whole, not just today’s update, you see that the overall picture is that Romney’s holding just about steady (very slight improvement) in how close he is to the nomination… this really didn’t help him all that much by that metric… but everybody else falls further and further behind… We still have the situation that so far Romney has 61.5% of the delegates… but he only needs 49.2% of the remaining delegates to win, so he can actually do slightly worse than he has been doing so far and still win…. while Gingrich, his nearest competitor, has only managed 23.1% of the delegates so far, but would need to get 52.0%… more than DOUBLE what he has been getting so far, in order to catch up and win. Now, that might still be possible… if some of the other candidates drop out… but while improving by a few percent is easy to see as possible, more than doubling how you have been doing so far is getting to be a really far stretch. Again, candidates dropping out could change dynamics. But as long as we have the four we have right now, the views forward for any of the non-Romneys involve them suddenly starting to do massively better than they have so far, so something dramatic would need to change. (Some would argue that some of the states coming up are dramatically different by their nature and this is the chance that these guys need. We shall see I guess… But it is seeming unlikely.)
Chart from the Abulsme.com 2012 Republican Delegate Count Graphs page. So, Nevada is being very slow in providing results for their caucuses. I waited and waited, but as of 22:00 UTC, I decided it was time to go ahead and post today’s update even though the final delegate counts for Nevada are not yet fully determined. As of an update posted around 14 UTC, The Green Papers gives 12 delegates to Romney, 4 to Gingrich, 3 to Paul and 1 for Santorum… with 8 yet to be determined. These are estimates pending the final vote counts. I imagine I’ll be posting an update tomorrow with the disposition of at least some of those 8 delegates. Based on the results so far though, despite actually getting some delegates this time since it was a proportional contest, only Romney actually did well enough to improve their overall position in the race. Romney needs a slightly smaller percentage of the remaining delegates to cinch the nomination that he did yesterday. For everybody else, even though they got some delegates, they did not get enough delegates to actually be catching up with Romney. They are only falling further behind.
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