Sharing the spoils of a low-key Saturday...

In what turned out to be a low-key, yet an important Saturday for the Republican primaries, Rick Santorum won just 1 of the 4 regions that went to the polls on 10^th March, 2012, while Romney won the remaining 3 by huge margins, the 3^rd by a process that is both controversial and funny at the same time J

"Suck on that Romney!"

But the lone win was enough to keep the Santorum camp happy and upbeat, as it was the state of Kansas, very much a Republican state – both the senators, all the 4 congressmen, the Governor and the Lt. Governor are all Republicans. Mainline Protestant, Evangelical Protestant, and Catholic are the three most populous religious groups here. No wonder Rick Santorum stormed to a victory here, getting over 51% of the vote. Mitt Romney came a distant second with 21% of the vote, which was enough to cross the threshold of 20% votes required to garner some delegates in the process. Gingrich and Paul came 3^rd and 4^th respectively.

However, Northern Mariana Islands and Guam – which do not have a say in the General Election but do have a say in the nominating process – voted heavily in favour of Mitt Romney, who carried all the 18 delegates available from these two regions.

Before we move on to explain what happened in the Virgin Islands, we will define two terms:

1. Pledged Delegate: A pledged delegate is elected or chosen on the state or local level with the understanding that they will support a particular candidate at the convention. However, pledged delegates are not actually bound to vote for the candidate. Candidates are allowed on a state-by-state basis to review the lists of delegates who have pledged their support and can delete anyone whose support they consider unreliable.

2. Bound Delegate: A pledged delegate who is actually bound to vote for the candidate they are chosen to represent is a bound delegate.

According to “The Huffington Post”, the RNC (Republican National Committee) does not count delegates from states like Iowa in its total. The Jan. 3 Iowa caucuses -- eventually declared for Santorum -- were given huge symbolic importance and played a big role in showing who the party's voters preferred, but did not officially allocate any of the state's 28 delegates to the national convention. Many caucus states are the same way. The role of delegates is to go to the party's national convention and cast their ballot for a presidential candidate.

The United States Virgin Islands Republican caucuses are quite hilarious – they vote of the delegates instead of the candidates themselves! The top six vote receivers became the final delegates.

The candidates included six delegates declaring for Paul, three for Romney, 2 for Gingrich, 2 for Santorum and 9 that had not declared for any candidate. Of all the votes, the plurality of the vote (29%) went to the six delegates of Ron Paul. However, the Romney supporters votes were more focused and concentrated compared to those for Ron Paul, whose votes were more evenly spread among the candidates. The Romney-ites voted in a bloc, and all their three candidates ended up in the top-6. The uncommitted delegate pledged to vote for Mitt Romney, who also had the support of the 3 Super Delegates from these islands. So effectively, Paul won the vote count (29%), but Romney ran away with 7 delegates compared to Ron Paul, who had to be content with just 1 delegate.

With this addition, the new delegate tally is as follows:

	Delegates so far	Guam	Virgin Islands	Northern Marianas	Kansas	Total Delegates
Mitt Romney	412	6	7	9	7	441
Rick Santorum	182	0	0	0	33	215
Newt Gingrich	110	0	0	0	0	110
Ron Paul	45	0	1	0	0	46
Unpledged/Ex-Officio/Uncommitted	38*	0	1	0	0	39

* Jon Huntsman tally of 2 delegates have been added to the “Uncommitted” column because he withdrew his nomination from the race quite a long time ago

Strange are the ways of the mighty and the ignorant. Stay tuned for the results from more Southern States…

Varun Reddy.