Mitt "I'm the only choice you have" Romney rumbles on
Ultimately, Super Tuesday is like any other primary night: each campaign's goal is to amass delegates. By that metric, Mitt Romney appears on track to have a fairly good night. According to Nate Silver's latest projection, the most likely outcome tonight is that Mitt Romney ends up with 224 delegates on the night—51 percent of those available, followed by Newt Gingrich with 20 percent and Rick Santorum with 17 percent, and the rest going to Ron Paul and uncommitted.
That would be a good result for Mitt Romney's primary campaign, but mostly because the rest of the field is divided. In 2008, as Nate Silver points out, John McCain actually did much better than Romney's projected 51 percent, taking just shy of 63 percent of the delegates in play.
That suggests that while Romney is likely to be the clear winner tonight, he's going to need something closer to John McCain-type numbers to be able to claim he's effectively ended the campaign. It might be obvious to uninvolved observers that things are over if he's at 51 percent, but his rivals are unlikely to think things are over until he gets himself on track to start taking a super majority of delegates at stake.
But even though Romney is going to have a good night delegate wise, he's not likely to do as well at the polls. If the tweet I posted at the top of this thread is any indication, Romney will probably win Ohio, but not by much. (Oops, I forgot to post the tweet—it's now in an update below.) And while the Romney much prefers the narrative in which he gets 38 percent is to Rick Santorum's 35 percent than the reverse (I'm just making this numbers up for illustrative purposes), the bottom line is that 38 percent is hardly evidence that he's won over a majority of Republicans. Nonetheless, if he strings together enough 38 percent finishes, he'll probably emerge as the GOP's only choice, albeit a lackluster one.
Anyway, enough word salad from me. After all, this is a prediction thread. Since there's a mix of states, how about a three part prediction: delegates, states won and lost, narrative.
I'm going to play it somewhat safe in my prediction and go with Nate's numbers for what to expect if Gingrich has a strong night (this is not his most likely scenario, referenced above):
Delegates: Romney 197, Gingrich 117, Santorum 64, Paul 35, Uncommitted 24.
State winners: Romney (OH, VA, MA, ID, ND, AK, VT), Gingrich (GA, TN), Santorum (OK).
Narrative: Among Republicans, Romney wins the night, but Gingrich shows signs of a third life. Santorum is headed out of the race and Paul remains a non factor. And overall, President Obama is once again the big winner.
The only thing that I'm sure about, however, is that I'm probably wrong. Except the part about President Obama.
3:33 PM PT: Here's the tweet about Ohio that I forgot to post:
CNN exit of Ohio: 64% of voters say they're "conservative." Romney and Santorum TIED among those.
— @GOP12 via web
3:41 PM PT: Something to keep an eye on:
Only in Georgia and Oklahoma did a majority say Tuesday that they voted for their candidate because they strongly supported him. In the other five states, most voters said they had reservations about their contender or voted for him because they disliked the other choices.