Florida - Meh

Barring some very weird skewing of the final vote in defiance of the polls, Mr. Romney will win Florida tonight. Newt will almost certainly finish in second place while Mr. Santorum and Uncle Ron slug it out for third.

The only question is what the final numbers are going to be and even that isn't that interesting. Florida (because of the penalty inflicted by the RNC for going early) lost half it's delegates and will be awarding them all to the winner rather than proportionately. As such, it doesn't matter whether Mr. Romney wins by 1 or 100,000 votes, he gets all 50 of Florida's delegates.

The anticipation is also diminished in that no one is going to drop out after Florida. The first four contests in February (Nevada, Maine, Colorado, and Minnesota) are caucuses which are easier to be competitive in on a shoestring budget (like Uncle Ron and Mr. Santorum are on). Missouri will have a primary but it's non-binding and means nothing outside of PR. Thus we do not have an actual primary which would require dipping harder in the budget until the end of February when Arizona and Michigan come up to bat (Michigan will be ceded to Mr. Romney. His father was governor there back in the 1960s and he has remained very popular in the state). Of course, once you've gotten this far, you might as well stay in one more week until Super Tuesday. So I don't believe that we will see the field reduced again until Super Tuesday at least.

Still, it will be fun to see the talking heads attempt to read the tea leaves and either claim or deny that the margin of victory and what people voted for whom means if you project forward to other states and the general election. The one narrative that could become very interesting is if Mr. Romney fails to win by the margin that the polls projected him at. Some polls had him building a large lead of 15 or more points. Others showed the gap narrowing to an 8 point lead. I would suspect that if the margin of victory is either less than 10 points or if Mr. Romney fails to clear 40% of the vote, there will be a discussion of how he is still vulnerable and is still failing to get conservative voters to fall in line.

Of course, if Mr. Romney blows his competition out of the water the discussion will be that opposition to him is essentially a waste of time and that we should start looking forward to Mr. Romney vs. Mr. Obama. We'll find out in a few hours. Most polls close at 7 pm EST but there are those in the panhandle that close at 7 pm CST so the News shows won't be able to announce full results (and the projected winner) until 8 pm EST.