McCain Wins South Carolina, Trails Romney 2 to 1

Senator John McCain won the South Carolina primary on Saturday, and picked up 19 convention delegates in the process. The American media are treating this as a major break-though and have decided he is the front-runner going into Florida a week from tomorrow. The troublesome fact, though, is that he has about half the convention delegates as Governor Mitt Romney.

The GOP convention in Minneapolis this summer will require 1,191 delegates to nominate a candidate. As of now, Governor Romney has 72 pledged delegates, while Senator McCain has 38, and Governor Huckabee has 29. Like the Democrats, the Republicans are a long way from picking a nominee.

What is important to the McCain campaign is winning in South Carolina after losing the state in 2000. That was a nasty vicious campaign in which the Bush machine claimed Senator McCain's adopted daughter (of Bangladeshi ancestry) was actually a child born out of wedlock to a black mother. Winning in South Carolina now undoes that defeat and gives Mr. McCain a leg up throughout the south.

Like New Hampshire, South Carolina allows independents to vote in the GOP primary. This is where Senator McCain does best. He won the independent vote by 17%. Among those who identified themselves as moderates, Mr. McCain won by 30%. In the general election, this is going to matter,

The race now turns to Florida, a state incapable of running an election without some kind of trouble. Here Rudy Giuliani is making his stand. He will probably not do well enough to carry the state, but Mr. Romney probably won't either. The question becomes how many delegates he can take with a second place finish.

© Copyright 2008 by The Kensington Review, Jeff Myhre, PhD, Editor. No part of this publication may be reproduced without written consent. Produced using Fedora Linux.

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