Posted by
cavalier973 on Monday, April 07, 2008 10:57:01 AM
A lot of knuckleheaded Mittwits have been all atwitter that Huckabee stayed in the race longer than Mitter the Quitter, but still garnered less delegates than Romney. Well, if you head over to realclearpolitics.com to check out the delegate count:
http://www.realclearpolitics.com/epolls/2008/president/republican_delegate_count.html you find that Romney won a whopping 2 delegates over Huckabee, even after spending many times the amount Huckabee spent.
The point of all this is that there's currently a groundswell of support for the idea that McCain should pick Romney as his running mate. But Romney is not the winner that everyone thinks he is. Romney only won in states where there was a caucus instead of a primary, and he only won in states that no one else had the time or money to run in. A caucus generally has you pick a preferred candidate and then a runner up candidate. If your preferred candidate is not doing well, you can switch your vote in the caucus to your secondary choice. A caucus also allows one candidate's supporters to try to convince others to join their side (remember West Virginia on Super Tuesday?), while a primary has you going into a booth and pulling the lever for your guy, like in an actual election. So while it may be that Romney won these caucuses straight up, it's also possible that Romney was merely everybody's second choice, and/or his supporters were a very convincing lot.
Meanwhile, Huckabee ran a campaign on a shoestring budget, and won primaries in several important, very Red, states--the South. So Huckabee has appeal in an area of the country that it is essential for McCain to win. The only thing Romney really brings to the table is lots of money, which McCain surely needs. The only thing is, lots of money only got Romney to third place. As I said in an earlier post, Grassroots mean more than Greenbacks.