Tuesday, February 5, 2008

Obama Wins Georgia, GOP still too close

It looks as though Sen. Barack Obama has won the Georgia Democratic primary. Early exit polls from the state, which just closed its ballots as of half an our ago, show Obama taking 2/3 of the vote among Democrats in the state who turned out the primary. Early results show Obama with 66% of the ballots cast, with Hillary taking the rest. Of course this is early, but Georgia is very rich with delegates for the one who takes the lion's share of the vote, and it looks like Obama right now.

The Republicans are still fighting it out in the state, with each of the three main candidates pulling around 30% right now, with Ron Paul pulling the rest. This is a surprising turnout for McCain, as Georgia is quite a conservative state, but he seems to be pulling a large contingent of the military vote, which is strong. Huckabee is picking up the Evangelical vote, and pushing Romney's numbers down amongst conservatives. The one who comes out the winner will pick up a big chunk of delegates, as of course, the Republicans run a winner-take-all campaign. Apparently McCain has spent a large percent of his time over the last two days in the northeast, in places like Massachusetts and New York, which surely cannot help him in the conservative southern states where he needed as much face-time as possible to convince these people that he was their candidate, strong conservative credentials or not.

By staying up north, where any Republicans would likely choose him anyways, McCain has neglected a large contingent of folks that make up the Republican electorate, and if he does go on to become the party's nominee, he may regret not giving the South more attention at this stage in the game. People don't have short memories when it comes to this sort of thing.

I'll stick with this and anything else, as the next polls close in just about 45 minutes...

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