After the Florida primary last week, I broke down how each Super Tuesday state awards its delegates and concluded that McCain could effectively wrap up the nomination tonight by amassing a commanding lead over Romney of 300 to 400 delegates. But Romney could keep the race close – and by close I mean within 200 delegates – if he can pull off an upset in Missouri, which awards all of its 58 delegates to the statewide popular vote winner. A recent SurveyUSA poll showed Romney trailing McCain by 5 points, and that lone victory would decrease McCain’s likely delegate lead from 287 to 171, according to this Townhall chart by Ryan Hawkins, who makes Super Tuesday speculations similar to my own. Another caution to anyone thinking about coronating McCain after the East Coast results are in tonight: Almost all of California’s 173 delegates are awarded by Congressional District, and there’s no way to know how the delegate count will end up based on the statewide polls that show Romney and McCain in a dead heat. If Romney can limit McCain’s lead to less than 200 delegates, he could keep the race going for at least another month by beating McCain next Tuesday in Virginia’s 63-delegate winner-take-all primary, and by winning a majority of delegates in the remaining February 9 and February 12 contests. The odds of this scenario are pretty long, but, hey, anything is possible.
