After regaining the momentum with victories in Michigan and Arizona last week — and another in Washington State at the weekend — Mitt Romney looks set to enjoy a pretty good Super Tuesday. He’s very unlikely to win all ten states voting today, but will probably substantially strengthen his position in the all-important delegate race nonetheless.
Much of the focus has been on the two biggest states: Georgia and Ohio. Georgia should provide Newt Gingrich with a much-needed and fairly comfortable victory — it is the state he represented in Congress, after all, and he’s focused a lot of his efforts there. The polls suggest a 20-point or so win for Gingrich in Georgia, but Romney looks likely to beat Rick Santorum for second place. Until recently, Santorum was the narrow favourite to win in Ohio, but in the last few days Romney has pulled ahead in the polls. It’s still possible that Santorum will win the state — Nate Silver’s model gives him a 35 per cent chance of victory — but Ohio’s rules mean that Romney will probably take the majority of the state’s delegates anyway.
Of the other states, three should provide Romney with big victories: Massachusetts, the state he governed for four years; neighbouring Vermont; and Virginia, where only he and Ron Paul are on the ballot. Idaho’s large Mormon population should also help him to victory in the caucuses there. On the other hand, his chances of winning Oklahoma are small — Santorum’s got about an 11-point lead there. The other three states voting today are harder to predict. The latest poll in Tennessee had Romney on 30 per cent and Gingrich and Santorum both on 29, and there’s been no polling in North Dakota or Alaska.
If Romney does win any — or even all — of those last three states, it’ll be a very good night for him. But even if he doesn’t, he’ll still probably come away with more than 200 of the 422 delegates allocated tonight, while his opponents split the rest. That would extend his lead over Santorum in the delegate race — which already stands at about 100 delegates — to about 200 to 250 (depending how many Santorum and Gingrich get). That would make the path to the nomination for anyone else very difficult indeed.
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