Nate Silver has some interesting analysis on today’s caucuses in Colorado and Minnesota, and the primary in Missouri. It’s interesting that Romney canceled planned appearances in Minnesota to race back to Colorado. I say it is interesting because polling shows that Romney is favored to win in Colorado but is in a toss-up race with Santorum in Minnesota. This move might indicate that Romney’s internal polling shows him losing in Minnesota and in Missouri, and he wants to run up the score in Colorado to compensate.
In some sense, all of these contests are a fraud. They’re non-binding, and the actual delegates won’t be selected until party conventions later in the year. The Missouri primary is actually a complete beauty contest. Gingrich isn’t even on the ballot and the result has no bearing at all on delegate selection. The delegates will be determined by a caucus on March 17th. The only reason today’s primary is even being held is because the Republicans couldn’t get their act together to cancel it.
Nevertheless, polling shows that Rick Santorum is primed to win the Missouri primary tonight. It won’t win him any delegates but, if combined with a win in Minnesota, it will boost Santorum’s campaign and cast some real doubt about Romney’s ability to compete with Obama in the Midwest.
After tonight, we’ll have the results of the Maine caucuses on Saturday and then we won’t have another contest until Arizona and Michigan have their primaries on February 28th.
If Romney sweeps tonight in Colorado and Minnesota, he’ll probably have no problem winning in Maine and then the GOP will spend the hiatus between Feb. 11 and Feb. 28 trying to consolidate around his candidacy. But that won’t be possible if Romney loses to Santorum in Minnesota and Missouri. Either way, it seems to me like Gingrich will have a hard time staying in the race long enough to get to the Super Tuesday contests on March 6th. The biggest prize on Super Tuesday is Gingrich’s home state of Georgia, with 76 delegates. Gingrich could hope to win in Oklahoma and Tennessee on that day, too. But it won’t matter if he can’t survive the rest of February, and tonight won’t offer him much hope.
Let’s hope Sticky Rickey has a big night tonight and keeps everything in chaos.
