Counting Delegates When Delegates Count
Wednesday, March 1, 2000
George W Bush was expected to win the Virginia Primary. And he did. Bush was expected to win in North Dakota. He won that one, too. Those were expected and, although the wins were modestly newsworthy, they were not surprising.
Washington State was up for grabs. Washington is a Northwestern state - as opposed to a Southern state - and is known to be at least a little kinky in its voting habits. It was in Washington State that McCain wanted to make news last night by winning the election for delegates there. Bush won by 20 percentage points: 58-38; a larger margin than he won in Virginia.
McCain did not win the Republican primary election in Washington State and, in spite of the fact that by the time the win was put up in the Bush column it was well past the deadlines for Eastern and Midwestern newspapers it is the Washington State result which will reverberate over the next week.
The early returns in the beauty contest showed McCain winning, but as later numbers have become available, Bush won in that contest, also. As of 10:00 AM on Wednesday morning Bush led McCain in the open contest as follows:
Bush: 292,173 -- 31.6%
McCain: 282,756 -- 30.6%
Gore: 218,958 ---- 23.7%
Bradley: 114,186 - 12.4%
Keyes: 15,371 ---- 1.7%
A quick look at overnight web pages showed the following headlines: NY Times: "Bush Takes Virginia in a 3-State Sweep"; Washington Post: "Coast-to-Coast Wins Boost Bush"; NY Post: "Bush Wins Virginia, North Dakota And Washington"; Dallas Morning News: "Bush has triple victories;
Gore wins in Washington".
Those headlines do not portend well for the California campaign where McCain, again, is aiming to win the open, non-delegate primary election while Bush has a big lead in the Republicans-only campaign for delegates.
If the media does not put a higher value on the California beauty contest than they did on the non-delegate open primary in Washington, McCain will have a difficult time pressing his case that he should be awarded a significant proportion of the delegates based upon his showing, notwithstanding the results of the Republicans-only election.
Bush has been on a mini-roll. Since he lost the elections in Michigan and Arizona last week, he has rolled up victories in American Samoa (4), Guam (4) Virgin Islands (4) and Puerto Rico (14).
Last night Bush won 56 delegates in Virginia, 14 in North Dakota and 7 in Washington. Add it all up, and Bush has won 103 delegates in the last week to McCain's 9.
Next week, Super Tuesday, has 613 delegates up for grabs with the two biggies being California (162) and New York (101). On the heels of that, Wyoming (22), Utah (29) and Colorado (40) are up on March 10th, and then Texas (124) and Florida (80) for a total of 908 delegates by the evening of March 14th.
For the list of Super Tuesday states and the delegates available in each, go to the Secret Decoder Ring page.
In Monday's Mullings, in the interests of getting a good line in, I wrote the last Republican member of the Alexandria, Virginia City Council had been appointed by King George III. A ton of readers e-mailed me to point out that Bill Cleveland is a long-term, highly respected Republican member of that organization.
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