Goobergunch Political Report

So, way back in January, Jon Huntsman was allocated 2 delegates in New Hampshire and promptly dropped out of the race. Now:

Romney for President today announced that former Jon Huntsman delegate Paul Collins and former Huntsman alternate delegate Brad Blais will support Mitt Romney.

So this means a delegate gets moved from the Huntsman column to the Romney column, right? Unfortunately, it’s a bit more complicated than that. See, the New Hampshire allocation is based on the state losing half of its delegates due to RNC sanctions for having an early primary. And the list of delegates provided by the New Hampshire Secretary of State gives a delegate slate that does not reflect those sanctions. Meaning that there are 3 delegates listed for Huntsman, when only 2 will be able to vote at the convention.

(Looking to the 2008 convention, when New Hampshire was similarly sanctioned, doesn’t help. The state actually announced 24 votes for McCain from the convention floor, even though only 12 were counted by the Chair.)

In the spirit of not being helpful to the delegate count, we have this from the Manchester Union Leader:

Huntsman’s other two New Hampshire delegates, consultant Sarah Crawford Stewart and business executive Renee Plummer, told the Status this morning they remain uncommitted. Plummer said she intends to remain uncommitted until the Republican National Convention in late summer.

In the spirit of trying to make some kind of sense out of all of this, here’s what I’m going to do with the two Huntsman delegates:

• The Union Leader claims that Huntsman’s “delegates were released when he dropped out”, but Huntsman’s 16 January statement was that he was suspending his campaign—not formally withdrawing. As such, I think this assertion is dubious. However, it is likely that if Huntsman has not yet released his delegates, he will do so prior to the convention. Huntsman supports Romney, and holding his delegates only hinders Romney from getting to 1144 delegates. Therefore, the two delegates now recorded as pledged to Huntsman will be considered unpledged. The Huntsman column will be removed from the delegate board.
• There are no indications that the Republican Party is likely to restore New Hampshire to 24 delegates. They didn’t do so in 2008, and that convention wasn’t at all contentious. Therefore, I’m not going to adopt the alternative count that conforms with the New Hampshire Secretary of State’s list.
• The delegate preferences of the three Huntsman delegates appears to be: Romney 1, Uncommitted 2. Given both the New Hampshire delegation’s overall lean and Huntsman’s endorsement of Romney, I’m inclined to predict that the rest of the Huntsman delegates are more likely to break to Romney than to any other candidate. So I’m going to give the benefit of the doubt to Collins’s seating and declare the current breakdown to be: Romney 1, Uncommitted 1.
• If, later in the primary process, it appears that the result of the first ballot is seriously in doubt, I’ll be prepared to actually contact the Republican National Committee, or the New Hampshire Republican Party, and seek clarification about the composition of the New Hampshire delegate slate.

So yeah, this has been a really long-winded way of allocating Romney Delegate No. 515.

Final results are in from Super Tuesday’s Alaska caucuses, and the revised delegate count is: Romney 8, Santorum 8, Paul 6, Gingrich 2. Santorum picks up a delegate and Gingrich loses one.

No word yet on who, if anybody, Alaska’s three RNC member delegates are supporting.

Remember that disputed Wyoming delegate?

UPDATE [16:56 MST]:Fun!

PLEASE NOTE: PARK COUNTY RESULTS ARE NOW IN CONTESTED MODE AND ARE NOT CONSIDERED FINAL, BUT PENDING.

That’s a Santorum delegate at the moment; the caucus vote in Park County was reported as Santorum 29-27 Romney.

Well, the Park County Republican Executive Committee voted last night to award the delegate in question to Romney. So the revised Wyoming delegate count to date: Romney 9, Santorum 2, Paul 1, with 17 “unallocated”.

And while we’re on the subject of challenged delegates, apparently the Santorum campaign intends to pursue a credentials challenge against the Arizona and Florida delegations for being winner-take-all in violation of Republican party rules. Presently, Romney will get all 79 delegates from those states. The Santorum challenge would allocate those state delegates as follows:

In total, this challenge would remove 42 delegates from the Romney column if successful.

I still think Romney gets the nomination on the first ballot, and I suspect tonight’s Illinois results will help solidify those expectations. But this year’s convention could still be quite entertaining.

Romney gets all 20 pledged Puerto Rico delegates:

 Romney will top 50 percent and win all 20 of the island’s delegates to the Republican presidential nominating convention in August.

And Santorum looks silly for campaigning there.

After resynchronizing the relevant portions of the delegate count with data from the Republican National Committee, the pledged delegate count from Alabama has been revised to: Santorum 22, Gingrich 14, Romney 11. All other pledged delegate counts from this week remain unadjusted.

Because numbers are rather dry, here’s a graphical representation of the state of the primary race at this point. Each square represents 1 delegate. Romney’s delegates are marked in blue, Santorum’s in red, Gingrich’s in orange, Paul’s in green, and Huntsman’s in violet. Gray squares indicate “uncommitted” delegates who have not announced support for a candidate—most of these are automatic RNC delegates.

Because I wanted to give some indication of how caucus states have voted, I’ve also added striped squares based on the Associated Press’s delegate allocation for caucus states. I do not endorse the methodology behind these counts and they may not actually resemble the final delegate allocation in these states. (Of these “fantasy delegates”, 73 are allocated to Santorum, 62 to Romney, and 15 to Paul.)

In the upcoming week, 94 more delegates will be allocated from Puerto Rico, Illinois, and Louisiana.

Add another superdelegate for Romney, this time from Washington, D.C.:

Of the four remaining GOP candidates, Rick Santorum is the only candidate not on the ballot in the District. The city’s Republican Committee Chairman Bob Kabel is backing Mitt Romney.

That’s Romney’s second District of Columbia delegate.

Another AP report from the territories:

Chairman Herb Schoenbaum says Romney can count on seven delegates from the Virgin Islands. He already had three superdelegates before Saturday’s caucuses and he picked up three more in voting in St. Thomas and St. Croix. After the vote, an uncommitted delegate switched to Romney.

Ron Paul got one delegate, and one delegate remains uncommitted.