'Uncommitted' is keeping it closer than expected in the Kentucky Democratic presidential primary. With 104 of 120 counties counted, President Barack Obama leads 'Uncommitted' by only 20 percentage points. The tally so far: Obama with 105,487 votes (or 60.04 percent of the vote), while 'Uncommitted' claims 70,211 votes (or 39.96 percent).
(UPDATE: With 99.8 percent reporting, Barack Obama has 119,245 votes, while 'Uncommitted' has 86,789 votes. That is, Obama has 57.9 percent of the vote, while 'Uncommitted' has 42.1 percent.)
The Republican primary isn't nearly as close. Presumptive Republican nominee, Mitt Romney, leads his closest rival, Ron Paul, by over 55 percentage points so far. The current tally: Romney has 107,362 votes (or 66.85 percent of the vote), Paul with 20,117 votes (12.53 percent), Rick Santorum with 14,230 (8.86 percent), Newt Gingrich with 9,459 votes (5.89 percent), and 'Uncommitted' with 9,428 (5.87 percent of the vote).
Paul, Santorum, and Gingrich have dropped out (or, in Paul's case, essentially dropped out) of the race. Needless to say, 'Uncommitted' is not an actual candidate.
As he sat in a prison cell in Texas, Keith Judd, inmate # 11593-051, was winning 40% of the vote in the West Virginia Democratic primary last week amid whatever fanfare one could receive in such a place.
In the wake of Keith Judd's inspiring showing in the West Virginia Democratic primary, one wonders if there's another state where Democrats could be encouraged to exercise their sovereign right of choice to refuse to rubber stamp the renomination by their party of President Obama.
It turns out the state in question may be Arkansas.
In Carmel, Indiana over the weekend, a supporter of congressional candidate Susan Brooks was caught on video tape stealing campaign signs of opponent David McIntosh:
"It appears that former U.S. Attorney Susan Brooks has resorted to the type of gutter politics that one sees too often in Washington – and which everyone is getting sick of," McIntosh's campaign manager writes in an email, providing a link to this video:
The month of April is a big one in the GOP nomination battle, with major states in the Midwest and Northeast up for grabs, and more than 300 delegates at stake.
Rick Santorum’s 22-point margin of victory in yesterday’s Louisiana primary was the 2nd-largest in any GOP primary this year — and was the largest outside of any candidate’s home state.
The latest Rasmussen poll of likely GOP primary voters, taken the day after Mitt Romney’s win in Illinois, shows Rick Santorum with a 12-point lead over Romney in Louisiana (43 to 31 percent).
While it’s clear that regional variations have played a role thus far in the Republican primaries — with Mitt Romney doing well in the Northeast but not in the South, for example — breaking down the contests along other lines might help shed some additional light on the race.
Earlier in the week we noted that Mitt Romney won 9 delegates from Guam, where only 215 people voted. That's impressive efficiency. But it's nothing compared with the work Romney's campaign did in American Samoa last night. Romney won 9 delegates from American Samoa, too. Want to guess how many voters caucused there? Go ahead. I'll wait.
With the Alabama and Mississippi primaries now complete, and with the Hawaii caucuses counted, more than half of the states (accounting for 41 percent of the delegates) are now in the books in the Republican presidential race. Through these first 26 states, Mitt Romney has won 52.7 percent (496 of 942) of the available delegates, a shade over the 50 percent rate he must eclipse in order to secure a majority of the delegates (1,144 of 2,286) before the GOP convention.
