If Santorum does his part the rest of the way, Romney will be 250 short at the convention, while Santorum would be about 300 short. If Santorum fades, or Paul or Newt draw too much from him, Romney could pick up the 250 before then.
Santorum is not going to fade.
Wisconsin Freepers: Please contact me via private mail. We’ve got work to do.
I don’t see how Santorum puts that much of a dent in Mitt unless Newt drops out or suddenly drops to less than 5% in the 14 or so variations on winner-take-all states from here on out. The math seems to show Romney getting very close to 1,144 at the current trajectory, enough that any contest at the convention would be a foregone conclusion, because you have over 100 unpledged RNC delegates who can vote for whoever they want even on the first ballot plus Ron Paul’s delegates opening up on the second ballot.
Newt will be acting as Rick’s Ross Perot in the many numerous winner-take-all states and districts coming up (far more than in the primary’s first half).
Illinois is a case in point. It has direct delegate election by district, which means whichever candidate’s delegates get the most votes in that district, win the whole district. Romney is polling 35-31-12-7 right now in Illinois. Newt is taking enough votes away from Rick to give him second place. If that vote spread held across every district, Mitt would win ALL 69 delegates in Illinois. If Newt dropped out and Rick got 75% of his votes (even if Mitt got the other 25%) then Rick would win those instead.
Upcoming are 622 delegates from “conditional” or by-district winner-take-all states, all ones “moderate” enough to give Mitt the win out of a split vote, just like Ohio and Michigan did:
Illinois
Pennsylvania
West Virginia
California
New York
Texas
Connecticut (a mix)
The fully statewide winner-take-all contests are perhaps less likely to be lost by Mitt in any type of race. Although I’m not sure what the character of Republicans is in all these states and if Santorum could win any, except of course Wisconsin. 228 delegates from these.
Puerto Rico
Maryland
Washington D.C.
Wisconsin
Delaware
New Jersey
Utah
439 delegates remain from proportional contests. The problem with these is while most of them favor the conservatives, Romney is going to be able to accumulate delegates from them anyway. Since they’re not WTA, we can’t shut Romney out of delegates in the states where we’re likely to be the winner.
Louisiana
Rhode Island
North Carolina
Oregon
Arkansas
Kentucky
New Mexico
South Dakota
Nebraska
Indiana
Montana
Missouri
If Romney gets 150 from the proportional, 186 from the statewide winner-take-all (subtracting Wisconsin), he’s up to 831. He’d only need HALF of the delegates from those seven “conditional” winner-take-all states to hit his magic number. When you consider he’ll get maybe 150 from Ron Paul and the RNC combined, he only needs about 150 from the 622 in those states to get to a “safe” zone.
The ONLY strategy is to make it a 2-man race and then BLOW Romney out of the water in as many winner-take-all states and districts as possible. The status quo has Romney sailing pretty comfortably to the nomination. We have to deny him VIRTUALLY EVERY DELEGATE in Illinois, Pennsylvania, West Virginia and Texas and maybe half of the California and New York ones. To do that we need to have a candidate that wins THE MOST VOTES in almost every district. That will not happen when we have one candidate siphoning off votes from the other.