A Hair Short

Pretty much every round up of the news has Mr. Romney now being declared the (unofficial) official nominee. However, he came up just a tiny bit short in the delegate count to make that declaration.

Mr. Romney won 105 delegates last night which puts his hard total at 1080. If you include party leader pledges, that number jumps to 1115. If you throw in projections from caucus states of Iowa and Washington, it jumps to 1139. I'm sure that there are a few other states that have not made their full allocation yet (such as Missouri and Louisiana) that have been included in the projected news totals and that puts Mr. Romney over the top.

But if you are doing that, what's the point? We've known since mid-April that Mr. Romney is going to be the nominee and if you are just tracking delegates so you can make a declarative statement, why not wait until you have hard numbers rather than just relying on projections from conventions? Granted, a number of those conventions meet this weekend, but still.

Looking forward, Washington State has their state convention as does Missouri and Louisiana this weekend. Mr. Romney had been projected to win 16 of Washington's 40 available delegates but I'm sure he'll walk away with more which will put him over the top. If he didn't, you have 25 delegates in Missouri and 23 delegates in Louisiana available and I doubt Uncle Ron's hoards will be able to thwart Mr. Romney in all of them.

On the Senate side, Mr. Dewhurst was unable to crack the 50% threshold (45-34) so he'll have a runoff with Mr. Cruz on July 31. The Democrats will also have a run-off between their two top vote getters: Paul Sadler and Grady Yarbrough.

Although no delegates were awarded, Mr. Obama managed to avoid the embarrassment that had marked the last three southern contests by snagging 88% of the vote against 3 challengers (including the same John Wolfe who took over 40% of the vote in Arkansas).