Saturday was about
math, as Maggie Haberman writes at
Politico:
“Mitt Romney wins Saturday delegate count,” read a memo from his campaign on Saturday, pointing out that while Santorum won as many as 34 delegates in the Kansas caucuses earlier in the day, Romney took in four more delegates with his wins in U.S. territories (by the campaign’s math, Romney has to win just under 50 percent of the remaining delegates, while Santorum has to take 65 percent and Gingrich has to take 70 percent).
“In what was hyped as a big opportunity for Rick Santorum, he again fell short of making a dent in Mitt Romney’s already large delegate lead,” the campaign wrote.
Romney also won 7 of 12 delegates at stake in Wyoming’s GOP county conventions Saturday.
Now, Romney’s foes are eying a different goal — keeping the front-runner from amassing the 1,144 needed to clinch the nomination by the time the last votes are cast on June 26 in Utah, a winner-take-all state that is all-but-certain to be in Romney’s win column. It’s a play that would, they hope, set up a potential fight at the convention.
Nate Silver looks at county numbers:
In almost all cases, Mr. Romney’s results in urban and suburban counties have been better than in rural portions of the same states. But the urban-rural split seems to be relative to a different baseline in each region. He performed better in the most rural parts of Arizona, for instance, than he did the most well-off suburban counties in Kansas, Missouri and Minnesota.
Jay Cost has noticed a similar pattern when looking at the exit polls. In almost all states so far, Mr. Romney has performed better among voters who describe themselves as “somewhat conservative” than those who say they are “very conservative,” and better among voters who say they are moderate than those who describe themselves as conservative at all.
The geographic trends seem to outweigh this, however. In the Northeast, Mr. Romney has carried even very conservative voters by an average of 20 points so far. But in the South, excluding Florida, he has only tied his opponents even among moderate and liberal Republicans.
