Arizona and Michigan Today

After a long hiatus, we are actually going back to voting today. Arizona and Michigan vote today.

Arizona is a complete non-story. Mr. Romney has been polling about 15 points ahead and has the backing of the senior Senator (John McCain) and the governor (Jan Brewer). Polls close at 7 pm MST (9pm EST) and I would expect the networks to all call it immediately for Mr. Romney. What's more, since it is winner-take-all, there's very little interest in seeing how the remaining candidates did or where they won their votes outside of national data miners.

Michigan, on the other hand, will be far more interesting. Polling has shown Mr. Romney and Mr. Santorum running neck and neck for the past week or so. Mr. Romney has been shown to have a slight lead but that is within the margin of error. He also has a lead in those that have voted early. However, Mr. Santorum has been shown to be the choice of those planning on voting today. He also is polling higher among those Democrats who plan to vote in the Republican contest today. One can read whatever motive you want into that bit of information.

Polls close at 8pm EST for most of the state. However, the UP has polls open until 8 pm CST (9:00 pm EST) and that will prevent the networks from calling anything until then. Michigan will allocate two delegates to the winner of each Congressional District and then Mr. Romney and Mr. Santorum will split the remaining two delegates as they will be the two top vote-getters. I would suspect that Mr. Santorum will do better in the more rural areas while Mr. Romney wins in the thumb and around Detroit. That will probably lead to a balancing of the delegate allocation (since there are more CDs around Detroit to make up the delegate count). In the end, I wouldn't be surprised to see a near tie in delegate allocation (15-15). As far as the overall win, if turnout is low, Mr. Romney should win. If turnout is high, I think Mr. Santorum wins.

Since Mr. Romney will take all 29 of the Arizona delegates, he will have a pretty good night for himself with a takeaway of between 40 and 45 delegates while Mr. Santorum only takes between 15 and 20 delegates. But its the grab for the headlines that is important. If Mr. Santorum manages to win Michigan (even if it is by one vote), he grabs the story about taking it to Mr. Romney in his birth state. If he follows that up with a win in the Washington caucuses on Saturday (where polls currently have him ahead), Mr. Santorum will be well poised to build a strong narrative going into Super Tuesday.

From a delegate standpoint, Mr. Romney will stay safely ahead even through Super Tuesday, no matter what the results. I think it is unlikely that Mr. Santorum will even come close to overtaking Mr. Romney in the delegate count until the middle to end of May. If the two men stay close, it will make the delegate feasts of Texas (155) and California (172) the potential deciding factors. It will be interesting to see how things play out going forward.