With 45 of 45 precincts reporting, Mitt Romney has won the Republican caucuses in Hawaii. Romney received 45 percent of the vote, Rick Santorum 25 percent, Ron Paul 18 percent, and Newt Gingrich 11 percent.
Rick Santorum won two surprise victories last night in the Alabama and Mississippi primaries, and he did so by poaching voters from Newt Gingrich’s coalition. To appreciate this, let’s take a look at some data.
First, the topline numbers in the four Deep Southern states that have voted so far.
“Senator Santorum is at the desperate end of his campaign,” Mitt Romney told CNN's Wolf Blitzer on Tuesday. Oops. For weeks, Team Romney and many of its allies have been eager—one might even say desperate—to end this campaign. The Republican primary electorate has been resisting this, and the voters in Alabama and Mississippi engaged in massive resistance yesterday, giving Romney less than a third of their votes.
Today is a relatively big day in the GOP nomination battle -- with caucuses in American Samoa and Hawaii and primaries in Alabama and Mississippi. The main story is in the South, though. And although this Southern Super Tuesday has relatively few delegates at stake – just 84 are up for grabs between the Alabama and Mississippi primaries – it will likely attract a good deal of attention. It will also offer something we have not yet seen: a roughly equal three-way battle between Newt Gingrich, Mitt Romney, and Rick Santorum.
By a 59 percent to 41 percent margin, Mississippi voters defeated a measure Tuesday that would have amended the state's constitution to hold: "The term ‘person’ or ‘persons’ shall include every human being from the moment of fertilization, cloning or the functional equivalent thereof." But the defeat should not be taken as a "major setback" for abortion opponents. The amendment did not have the backing of major pro-life groups, such as
On November 8, the citizens of Mississippi will vote on a controversial amendment that would define every human being as a person from the moment of conception. The measure, known officially as Proposition 26, is one of six personhood amendments proposed for addition to state constitutions around the country.
Proposition 26 will appear on a statewide ballot after passing successfully through the Mississippi Supreme Court in September. If the measure is voted in, an amendment will be added to the Mississippi constitution that will state in part:
Staff Sgt. Jason Rogers, of the United States Marine Corps, was killed in combat earlier this month in Afghanistan. A heartbreaking YouTube video of the funeral procession in Brandon, Mississippi (located in Rankin County) has been posted:
On Wednesday, Nate Silver – in a piece playfully entitled “Is Mississippi The New New Hampshire?” – presented an interesting analysis of Gallup’s recent data dump on statewide changes in President Obama’s job approval. Silver rightly notes that the president’s job approval – measured against his 2008 vote – has ticked up slightly in several (mostly Southern) states. Meanwhile, his position in the South relative to the rest of the nation appears to have improved substantially.
How does a Republican unseat a conservative Democrat who voted against Obamacare and cap-and-trade? Mississippi state senator Alan Nunnelee, who spoke with me last week in Washington, thinks he has the answer.
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