The Five Stages of Political Grief
Sometimes it takes more than five.
Update:
K-Lo's emailer is still stuck on #1:
I notice on RealClearPolitics that the Republican race is closer than
the Democratic race, both in delegates and in the national poll.
Is anyone writing off Obama?
Should Republicans allow themselves to be stampeded by the MSM into
accepting McCain as the winner before the race if over?
Denial is not just a river in Egypt. Let's look quickly at a couple of the February 5 contests. McCain leads by 12.5 points in New York, and 17.3 points in New Jersey. Both of those states are Winner-Take-All. McCain appears to have those states in hand, unless Mitt starts crying. New York has 101 delegates, while New Jersey offers 52, so that's an additional 153 delegates that are virtually in the bank. California has 173 delegates, but the state is not winner take all, rather candidates win delegates in each congressional district. McCain currently leads the polling in the Golden State by 32-24 over Romney, but that's with Giuliani in the race. If we assume rather arbitrarily that Guiliani's roughly 12% support goes half and half to those candidates (not much overlap in Giuliani's supporters and Huckabees), then McCain's at 38, Romney 30. Just on a proportional basis that would indicate McCain should get at least 66 delegates, quite probably more.
Missouri? McCain's up by 3.6 points in this winner take all contest with 58 delegates, and he's up over Huckabee; Romney's 7 back. In Georgia with 72 delegates, Huckabee's up 5.7 in the average, but the latest poll has McCain up by 11 over both Romney and the Huckster.
There are very few places where Romney is winning; looking now I can only see Massachusetts and Utah, and arguably Maine, although Ron Paul is strong there. So the news on Tuesday night is that Romney wins where he should win, while McCain wins the big prizes.
Of course, Ann Coulter
is at stage four.
Labels: John McCain, Mitt Romney
