GOP Primary Scoreboard - Super Tuesday Edition

Now that we've got so many states up on the board, I've changed the data presentation slightly.  Instead of listing the percent of allocated delegates in the second column, I've substituted the percentage of unallocated delegates that each respective candidate needs to win in order to hit the magic number of 1,191 and clinch the nomination (e.g. 38% for John McCain).  This metric is labeled "Burden" (or "B" in the sidebar scoreboard).

Yesterday obviously didn't go quite as the Romney campaign might've liked, but it'll be interesting to see where we are after the CPAC conference that kicks off tomorrow.  Last year, Romney won the CPAC straw poll, while McCain finished dead last.  Human Events is reporting that McCain plans to cue up some Reagan video to introduce the candidate posthumously to the CPAC crowd.  He may receive a less-than-bowled-over response from the crowd of thousands of conservative activists in the house of the conference that Reagan built.

For the updated scoreboard, I've credited McCain with all 170 delegates tied to the California primary.   These haven't been formally allocated yet, but since California is winner-take-all by Congressional district, and since McCain won every county in the state,  I think it's a good bet he'll take the whole lot. 

While the California boost brings McCain's total delegate haul to more than 60% of the magic number, a few embers of hope continue to smolder for Romney supporters, so long as you shield your eyes from the delegate totals.  The preferred media synopsis of the race to-date is that McCain has clearly dominated the ballot boxes, that Huckabee has experienced a resurrection and outperformed, and that Romney has sagged into near oblivion.

The aggregate metrics, however, tell a different story.  McCain leads in states won with 12, but that's only one ahead of Romney, who's prevailed in 11 (Huckabee is way back with just 6).  More strikingly, McCain and Romney are exactly tied for average place finish at 1.897th.  Romney manages to co-hold this top spot by doing reasonably well everywhere.  McCain on the other hand has slunk out of several states with rotten fruit being slung at him by Republican voters.  In 7 states (one quarter of the races to-date), McCain has finished with less than 10% of the vote.  Romney has never failed to crack double-digits.  On a weighted-average basis (with each stated weighted for the number of votes cast, which underweights caucuses and thus understates Romney's score), McCain leads in aggregate vote share, but not by much.  His 38.3% is less than 6 points ahead of Romney's 32.6%.  What's more, if you take a simple, unweighted average of the vote share the candidates received in each of the 29 contests, Romney leads McCain 37.4% to 30.5%.  For his part, Huckabee trails far behind both McCain and Romney by every measure.

The "medal count" through Super Tuesday offers a visualization of the distribution of state-by-state finishes that illustrates why Romney is still tied for the lead in average finishing place.

What's more, this balance is likely about to shift toward Romney.  On Saturday, just as CPAC is wrapping up, Republicans in Washington (State) and Kansas will caucus.  As we know, caucuses strongly favor Romney - he's won them all, with the exception of Iowa where he placed second.

And finally, as Allah notes, the Romney campaign may be quietly mounting a delegate poaching expedition, which, if successful (albeit likely unpopular), might help shrink that pesky delegate gap down to size.

Previously:  Super Tuesday Marathon Live Blog

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Update:  Bryan's got a nice synopsis of yesterday's results in both the Republican and Democrat fields, what with the charts and maps and tables and such.

Update: Turns out Mitt is expected to pull between 6 and 12 delegates out of California (not zero).  The board's been adjusted accordingly (see sidebar), shifting 9 delegates from McCain to Romney.