What does Super Tuesday mean?
Tomorrow is the long-awaited Super Tuesday that everyone is talking about, but what does it really mean?
Well, for one thing, for the first time in a presidential campaign, twenty-four states will be holding their primaries on the same day. The last Super Tuesday in 2004, there were only ten states voting. So the stakes have more than doubled. Everyone predicted that by the day following Super Tuesday, both parties would know who would be their candidate for the November election. Now it doesn’t look that way, especially for the Democratic side.
For a Democratic candidate to win the party’s nomination they need a minimum of 2,025 delegates pledged to their campaign. Going into Super Tuesday, Hillary Clinton has 261 delegates and Barack Obama has 190 delegates. Polls show that the two are pretty close, especially with Obama’s recent surge. After tomorrow, it’s conceivable that neither candidate will have enough delegates to declare victory, especially since the Democratic method is to split the delegates proportionately. So Obama or Clinton could lose in any state with only 30-40% of the vote and would still get 30-40% of that state’s delegates. So the delegate count just keeps adding up until one or the other obtains the necessary 2,025. So you see, the hotly contested Democratic nomination could continue on well past Super Tuesday, unless one or the other candidate really gets the needed votes.
Things are done a little differently on the Republican side. The Republican nominee needs to gather 1,191 delegate pledges and so far the two frontrunners each have less than 100. Tuesday may bring a clear winner for the Republican nomination (polls show John McCain far in front) because delegates are won in a winner-take-all manner in the primaries. So if Mitt Romney was to get 49% of the vote to McCain’s 51%, McCain would get ALL the delegates for that state. Caucus states, where Romney has the lead, work a little differently. They award delegates in the same proportional manner as the Dems do, so Romney wouldn’t get all those delegates unless he won 100% of the vote.
Another fact in McCain’s favor is Mike Huckabee’s continued campaign, though he hasn’t had a decent showing since his upset win in Iowa. He’s being called a “spoiler” in the media, because his presence is certain to split the Conservative vote, thus assuring Romney’s loss and McCain’s win. Republicans who don’t want John McCain as the nominee are not very happy with Huckabee, but it’s a free country, and Huckabee’s entitled to his run, even if he carries a legacy of “spoiler” for it.
Tags: Barack Obama, caucus, delegates, Democrats, Hillary Clinton, John McCain, Mike Huckabee, Mitt Romney, Politics, Presidential primary, Republicans, Super TuesdayLeave a Reply
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