Super Tuesday, and the Aftermath...

Sorry for the delay in reporting the final numbers. I had an aggravating connectivity issue that took a while to solve.

Anyways, it looks like on one side, we came out with a clear nominee after the super primary, and on the other, the waters became as muddied as possible.

John McCain will be fightinig on until November, it seems, as he dominated Super Tuesday, winning the large chunk of states and delegates, and jumped about 400 delegates ahead of his nearest rival, Mitt Romney. Romney got hammered, losing the states he needed to have any shot, the ones with conservative bases, to Mike Huckabee. Huckabee played a magical spoiler for Romney, and really handed the campaign to John McCain.

Romney has since dropped out of the campaign, and rightly so. It would have been a waste of money from this point out, with almost no chance of him coming back from the blow Super Tuesday was to his campaign. I'm going to do a whole post in a bit on what happened to Mitt, the man who walks, talks, and looks just like a President, and yet, seemingly won't be.

Onto the Democratic dogfight, which is basically where this campaign is headed from this point out. On the day, Hillary pulled only a handful more delegates than Barack Obama, and squeaked out a narrow victory in California, the richest state, delegate-wise, of them all. Barack won a lot of not tradionally Democratic states, which bodes well for his range of support, as it shows he can walk the walk and pull in independent or even Republican-leaning people to vote for him come November.

What can be thanked for Barack's share of the delegates is the proportionate way the Democrats assign them to their nominees, as even though Hillary won the big population states, like California and New York, Obama still pulled a big portion over to himself. The Republicans, who operate on a winner-take-all type of system, ended up with their clear winner in John McCain, whose margin of victory in the states he won was around the same as Hillary or Barack in the states they won. But he got 100% of the delegates from each state, which gives him the crushing majority he holds now.

Hillary and Barack will be doing this dance for at least another month, maybe even more, maybe all the way to the convention a few months from now. This can only be viewed as bad for her and very good news for him.

Hillary has been slowly trending downwards and Barack has been slowly trending upwards over the last year or so. The curve has really accelerated the past month, with Obama catching up to her in almost every national and state poll, after being down by 20+ just months ago.

Hillary will really fight until the end, as she thought she was going to coast to this nomination, coast into the White House on a Democratic victory and a big 'Hell No' from the US on continuation of Bush-style leadership, but now this young upstart has come out of nowhere and stolen her nomination and her Presidency out from under her.

There is a better chance for Democrats (and sanity) in the US with Barack as the nominee. Its been said a million times, and I'm going to go there again. Hillary has too many negatives to win a national campaign. She can't grow the party to new voters, and some Democrats dislike her so much they will simply not vote, or will turn to a liberal type of Republican, as John McCain is. if 47% of potential voters say they will never consider voting for you, you're going to have a problem winning a plurality.

Obama also has higher numbers against McCain than Clinton does, beating him in almost every demographic and overall by 5-10 points. Hillary Clinton, on the other hand, is up and down, and within the statistical tie area against McCain nationally, winning ir losing to him by 2-3 points in every major poll taken.

Obama has also raised almost $40 million since the turn of the year, and $8 million alone in the 48 hours since the polls closed on Tuesday. He has at least $20 million still on hand by estimates, and will have all of that going forward to dominate the airwaves in the remaining states with his message.

Hillary, on the other hand, just lent her campaign $5 million of her own personal money to keep it afloat, and there are reports her top advisors and staffers will go without pay for the next month to give them some extra money to throw around. Hillary still has $20 million in her back pocket for a national campaign, but she might want to think about unleashing some of that now, or else there won't be a national campaign to run.

John McCain's job got much easier after Tuesday, as he can pretty much kick back, consolidate, work on unifying the Republican Party behind him (no easy task, I know, but easier when you don't have to fend off Romney) and begin to chip away at both of them. It's a virtual month or two headstart on the national campaign. He'll need it too, as Republicans are going to be a tough sell, but would be much easier against Clinton, and a lot harder against Obama.

I'll leave you with one thought from one of the most brilliant and hated political strategists the US political world has ever seen, Karl Rove. Now don't get me wrong here, I'm not promoting Rove and his brand of divisive political strategy, but it wins elections. He gave two elections to George Bush that the man had no business even being in, let alone winning. With Bush, Rove has proven his mastery, he can even put this man into the White House, twice. But the thought that I wanted to highlight was that Rove wants Hillary to win this nomination, wants it even more than a tradional conservative nominee on the right. He wants this because he knows Hillary is a much easier campaign opponent than Obama. She has skeletons, and a large list of negatives. Barack has less skeletons, and less negatives, and has a groundswell of support.

Rove would love it if Hillary Clinton won, which should tell all of us left of Hitler than Obama is the best chance to save the US in the coming election.

I will, of course, be here throughout the rest and far beyond, and I hope you will be too, because this is shaping up to be the election of a generation, and one that will affect the US, and the world, for a few more generations after that.