Republican Delegate Math

Is the Republican nomination over? All the media reports, at least the ones I saw (NY Times, NPR) say it is. The conventional wisdom is that McCain has it locked up. Huckabee definitely has a steep uphill climb. McCain has 714 delegates, Huckabee 181. There are 1,184 delegates left, and Huckabee needs 1,010 more delegates to win--84.8% of the remaining delegates. That's undoable for a candidate who lacks a broader appeal, particularly in the "upscale demographics" as Michael Barone puts it.

However, Huckabee doesn't have to get 1,191 delegates--he just has to stop McCain from doing it. McCain needs 477 more delegates. The remaining calendar shows that if McCain wins all the rest of the contests this month, he could lock up the nomination officially on March 4 with Texas, Vermont, Ohio, and Rhode Island. McCain still has to campaign hard, in other words. I've long maintained the theory that the anti-McCain vote (conservative Republicans) is larger than the vote for him (liberal Independents) in the primary constituency, and that he would have a problem once Romney or Huckabee (and Thompson) quit. Now it looks like it is too late for this theory to prove good, and McCain will coast to the nomination. But I've always been skeptical of conventional wisdom, and expect some bumps along the way for McCain.

Here's Sound Politics:

Examine the county map results in the states where Huckabee, McCain, and Romney were bunched most closely of any of the primary contests: Georgia, Missouri, and Tennessee. Even while finishing 3rd, Romney ran well and often won in and around populations centers with growing suburbs and exurbs such as Atlanta, Nashville, and Kansas City. Conversely Huckabee lost badly in those same counties yet cleaned house in rural areas, where Romney often fared poorly. And McCain had more distributed support, consistently running first or second in every county, melding his unique coalition of moderates, national security conservatives, and as Patrick Ruffini has described it: older belligerent men. Both Romney and Huckabee supporters can make the claim that their candidate would have benefited from a clearer field at an earlier date. That's possible given the dramatic change it would offer to the overall race dynamic. It's not clear, however, that such a shift would have stopped McCain, even if the stark differences between Huckabee and Romney's bases of support could be bridged.

McCain did himself a lot of good with his CPAC speech. Anyone who watched the whole speech (rather than just the news reports that featured only the booing on immigration) will see that he won over the crowd. Of course, most people probably didn't do this, and rely on scattered media headlines only.