Just as with my maps of the democratic race, all maps in this diary follow this color scale:
With each of the corners representing 100% of a counties vote for a single candidate and every color in between representing a ratio of votes proportional to the color's position on the triangle. In this case red is McCain, green is Huckabee, and blue is Romney. Counties with significant votes for other candidates will be darker than others. Light gray states have not yet voted and white counties have no returns.
Like previous maps I have done, you can access a larger version of each map from its Flickr page, which you can get to by clicking on the map, and I've also made color swapped versions, which are available at the bottom of the diary.
Here is the map of the Republican presidential primary contests so far:
States are subdivided by county, except for Kansas (by congressional district), Alaska (not subdivided), North Dakota (not subdivided), and West Virginia (not subdivided). Obviously, the Republicans have held contests in states where we have not yet (Montana and West Virginia) and and vice versa (Idaho, Nebraska, and Hawaii).
If you compare the map to a similar map of the Democratic primary so far, you may notice three major differences:
- The Republican race was mainly a three person race, while for the most part, the Democratic race was a two person race.
- The Republican race lacks some of the continuity of trends over state lines that occurs in the Democratic race.
- Some states in the Republican race, such as Montana and Wyoming, have a comical level of variability from county to county
There is a fourth observation that can be made if the candidates' vote ratios in each county are separated out:
McCain
Huckabee
Romney
Other
There is a significant vote for other candidates. This is split between multiple candidates and different states have different levels of those candidates. For instance, in Florida most of the "Other" vote is for Giuliani; in Washington, Maine, Montana, and Nevada, it's mostly for Ron Paul; in Iowa and South Carolina, it's mostly for Fred Thompson, and in Noxubee County, MS it seems that residents voted for anyone and everyone besides McCain (who won a plurality nonetheless).
Now, the great complexity of these patterns and the differences between trends from state-to-state are better understood in a temporal context, because though the Republican race was much less interesting intellectually and it was much clearer who would win early on, it was actually a much more dynamic race than the Democratic race
Early states
Like the Democratic race, the first Republican contest was held on January 3 in Iowa. However, unlike the Democrats, a good portion of the Republican field decided not to put a significant effort into winning Iowa. The two most notable players who didn't were John McCain and Rudy Giuliani, who the New York City/Washington D.C.-based "mainstream media" had pegged as the "frontrunner".
In reality, the two main players in Iowa were Mitt Romney, who had invested a great amount of his personal wealth into Iowa, and Mike Huckabee, who only appeared to be a major player after taking second in the Iowa straw poll in Ames (a Republican fundraiser that is mainly a spectacle of unabashed vote-buying), despite paying a small fraction of Romney's hundreds of dollars per vote. Afterward, Huckabee caught on as the favorite, easily winning Iowa despite having very limited resources.
Two days later, in the little-noticed Wyoming county conventions, Romney won most of the delegates (each county selected either a delegate or an alternate, which is the most detailed information available). The other delegate-electing counties elected delegates for Thompson and Hunter. McCain won one of the alternates.
The media spun Romney's loss in Iowa as a win for McCain, who took fourth in Iowa, since he had focused mainly on New Hampshire and South Carolina. This narrative paid off and McCain won New Hampshire, which further shot him forward in national polls.
Meanwhile, Romney staged his comeback in Michigan, which the RNC, unlike the DNC, had only stripped of half its delegates, a punishment they gave every early state. Romney's father George had been a governor of Michigan, so he enjoyed a certain home state advantage and pulled off a win despite the fact that many of the disenfranchised Democrats crossed over to vote for McCain (the effort to urge them to vote for Romney here on Daily Kos wasn't particularly effective if exit polls are to be believed).
After Michigan, the candidates focused on different states. Romney focused on Nevada while McCain and Huckabee focused on South Carolina, where Fred Thompson was also staging his last stand. Romney easily won Nevada with over half the vote, with Ron Paul taking second, but the media paid much more attention to the simultaneous race in South Carolina where McCain won a narrow plurality over Huckabee (33%-30%) but because of the Republicans' apportionment system won the vast majority of the delegates, giving him frontrunner status in the media.
The media coverage swung back to the Democrats while they battled for South Carolina a week later and all the Republicans moved on to Florida, where Rudy Giuliani had decided to do most of his campaigning, figuring that a win in Florida, with it's winner-take-all delegate apportionment, would send him back into the race, where he could take a decisive lead.
Unfortunately for Rudy, losing the other races by embarrassing margins (he did worse than Ron Paul in every race except New Hampshire) didn't impress the Floridians, who rewarded his attention with a distant third place to McCain who got the endorsement of Governor Crist two days before the election and Romney. Again, despite winning by only 5%, McCain took all the delegates making him the clear frontrunner. From this point on, the question of the race was not who the nominee would be but when McCain would win it.
February 5
February 5 was a big night for John McCain and also a night that proved once again that the mainstream media was out of touch. The narrative was that the race would be between McCain and Romney. Instead, the non-McCain vote was split between Romney and Huckabee, with Huckabee doing very well in the South and Romney narrowly winning his home state of Massachusetts as well as the sparsely populated Western states of Utah, Montana, North Dakota, and Alaska as well as Minnesota.
Montana looks like it should be a logo for the Montana Log Cabin Republicans because the only people eligible to vote were a few party leaders in each county and with the very small sample sizes in each county, there was wild variability in the results from county to county, especially in the east where the population is sparsest.
West Virginia still has a primary to run, but it's convention was won by Huckabee because after the first round, nearly all of the McCain preference group decided to join Huckabee's, to deprive Romney of the first round lead that would have won him the convention's delegates.
These wins were fairly empty for McCain's opponents, though, since McCain ended up winning the biggest states, most of which had winner-take-all or nearly winner-take-all delegate apportionment.
February 9
After the embarrassment of his February 5 performance, Romney suspends his campaign at the CPAC conference to the surprise of his staffers at the event. He draws some votes in the Washington caucuses and the Louisiana, but at this point, the race is plainly going to play out as a lopsided race between McCain and Huckabee. McCain wins the Washington caucuses and Huckabee wins Louisiana and Kansas, which are the last races he wins.
Potomac primaries
McCain extends his lead by sweeping Maryland, Virginia, and the District of Columbia.
February 19
McCain wins Washington's primary as well as the Wisconsin primary. Despite McCain's insurmountable lead, Huckabee continues to run and still pulls significant support.
March 4
Huckabee's last stand. McCain wins the 1191 delegates needed to ensure that he will be nominated in St. Paul in September.
Running virtually unopposed
Pennsylvania and Mississippi are the only states that have held contests since March 4 and both were overwhelming victories for the presumptive nominee, as should be expected from all future contests. Ron Paul continues to run his campaign, and he took second place in Pennsylvania, but with only 16% of the vote.
Part of the reason that McCain won so quickly, despite not being the clear frontrunner going into Iowa was the Republican delegate apportionment system and the McCain campaign's exploitation of it. Compare this map of the candidates' vote ratios by state:
To this map of the candidates' delegate ratios according to The Green Papers:
Starting with South Carolina and Florida, McCain won quite a few contests that were winner-take-all or nearly winner-take-all, and for many, he did it with less than half the vote. February 5 examples include Missouri (where he won by 1%, yet won all of its delegates), Delaware, California, Oklahoma, and even his home state of Arizona, where he won 47% of the vote.
His opponents on the other hand didn't take advantage of the system at all. The only winner-take-all state that Romney won was Utah, but he won it by such a ridiculous margin that he would have gotten nearly all the delegates anyway. His narrow win in Massachusetts earned him effectively nothing, since it had a proportional allocation system, as was the case with the caucus states he won. Huckabee only won all the delegates of Kansas, whose caucuses he won by a similar margin to Romney's Utah performance and Arkansas's lopsided distribution delegate distribution wasn't really that far off the result of the race.
The only part of the Republican race that is more democratic than the Democratic race is the fact that they have a much smaller body of RNC members which are analogous to our superdelegates.
Color swaps:
Original map
McCain monotone
Huckabee monotone
Romney monotone
Other monotone
Early states
February 5
February 9
Potomac
February 19
March 4
Mississippi and Pennsylvania
State level map
Green Papers Delegate ratios map
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