Florida Fluidity

What a difference a week makes. Last Friday, Newt was surging to the cusp of a dramatic win in South Carolina and Mr. Romney was looking battered and bruised. Now it is Newt that is looking battered and bruised. Mr. Romney has staunched the bleeding and is now moving to win Florida and take it's 50 delegates (winner-take-all primary).

The current delegate count is as follows:

Romney: 17
Gingrich: 27
Santorum: 6
Paul: 9
Huntsman: 2

There are more delegates that have to be allocated from the three previously decided contests, but those have not been fully calculated and allocated yet. So other totals are estimations based on what we do know. Most of those are given to Mr. Romney, who is believed to be working with 31 delegates at the moment. Winning Florida would bump up his total to at least 67 and perhaps as high as 81. Of course, it takes 1,144 delegates to secure the nomination so there is still a long way to go just yet.

The real curiosity will be in how things shake out from last night. Mr. Romney did well in the beginning but then got torn up by Mr. Santorum on his support for health care mandates. That won't dent much of Mr. Romney's support so I'd still look for him to settle in to the 35-40% range. However, Newt did not engage and scored no point for himself. With the conservative take down that Mr. Santorum gave, it is possible that some of the soft surge that Newt had gotten from South Carolina will bleed over to Mr. Santorum. That could end up putting both men in the twenties (high for Newt, low for Santorum) with Uncle Ron rounding out the field at around 10%. We'll see how things go. Perhaps some of the ads or some outside influence will change things beyond this before Tuesday. But this is my take at the moment.