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February 2, 2008

McCain Sits Pretty

In politics, anything can happen, and 72 hours can become an eternity. However, barring a major meltdown, it looks like John McCain has strong leads in most Super Tuesday states. Few offer the prospect of wins for Mitt Romney, and right now he has to hope that McCain fails to gain enough delegates to make the rest of the primary schedule a formality.

Real Clear Politics has the latest polling data for each of the contests, and the numbers look bleak for Romney. Mitt leads handily in Massachusetts, for instance, and will take a majority of its 42 delegates. He'll get all of Utah's 36 delegates in that winner-take-all state. He should get a third or so at least of California's delegation, around 60. Missouri is close, according to Rasmussen, and so is Tennessee. If Mitt gets the breaks in both states, he could have around 200 more delegates by the end of the night on Tuesday.

That doesn't mean much, though, when almost 1100 delegates are up for grabs. If John McCain wins six hundred or more of those delegates, he will have more than a three-to-one advantage and will only need four hundred more delegates to cinch the nomination. McCain looks set to easily win New York's winner-take-all for 101 delegates, Arizona's WTA 53, the majority of California's 173 delegates, all 42 of New Jersey's, and that alone adds up to about 275 delegates from just four of the 21 contests, in most of which McCain has strong leads for both proportional and winner-take-all states.

Mitt had better hope that his weekend ad campaign, combined with the support from talk-radio hosts, can move the needle quickly. If McCain comes out of Super Tuesday with 700 or more delegates locked up, Mitt would have to run the table in the rest of the primaries to beat him.

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