A few answers, a few more questions

Declarations that February 5 would amount to a national primary now appear to be misguided at best. Now that the dust has largely settled from the Super Tuesday primaries, few questions seem to be answered and more seem to have emerged.

On the Democratic side, the primaries failed to produce a resounding victory for either challenger - indeed, it may have failed to provide any victory at all.

Hillary Clinton succeeded in keeping leads in populous states such as California and New York, as well as fend off high-profile endoresements coming from the Kennedy dynasty by taking Massachusetts. However, her victories here did little to reinvigorate her campaign. A combined popular vote showed her splitting the votes nearly 50/50 with challenger Barack Obama, taking fewer states and perhaps even seeing her lead in the delegate race shrink by a handful.

Obama, on the other hand, can take little solace in his claim of taking more states and more delegates. His inability to convert a pre-election surge in California to a victory is a particularly stinging rebuke, and exit polls show that he has still yet to win over the hearts of women and Latino voters, powerful voting blocs in the Democratic party. Obama succeeded in narrowing the race but saw his surging popularity hit a fairly large speed bump on Tuesday that he must overcome.

Delegate counts as of this writing had Clinton narrowly ahead of Obama, 1012-933. With neither candidate having earned over 50% of the required 2025 for the nomination and less than half the states remaining to vote, there is real concern among Democrats that the protracted race may run all the way to Denver and the national convention.

Republican contests were a little more telling, yet failed to produce an assured victor for the nomination.

John McCain had much to smile about Wednesday morning, but weaker than expected showings in the South have left him short of claiming an all-out victory. Anticipated victories in the Northeast have inflated his delegate count, and a resounding victory in California has allowed his momentum to continue. Current results show him with less than 500 delegates left to snatch the nomination, and with 988 delegates left in the remaining states (as well as a handful yet to be calculated from yeterday's races), McCain need only capture half the remaining delegates for a win, a very likely feat as his current delegate count stands at 61% of the total awarded to date.

Mitt Romney, on the other hand, had the biggest headache to awaken to. Wins in Massachusetts and Utah were all but predetermined, and organizational payoffs in caucuses in Alaska, Colorado, Minnesota, Montana and North Dakota proved light in delegate counts and even lighter in momentum. Romney has been unable to capture a primary victory where he did not have "favorite son" status. He proved incapable of leveraging his status as "conservative" into anything better than a 3rd place showing in the South. More punishing was his loss in California - a state where he sunk over $2 million in advertizing and where pundits and pollsters were prognosticating a win for him - where McCain handed him a firm defeat in the popular count and a blistering 146-3 loss in delegate count as of this writing. Romney has insisted he will fight on but his prospects look bleak : Virginia offers 63 delegates in an upcoming winner-take-all primary but the vast majority of upcoming delegates are handed out more proportionately. With a deficit of 947 delegates for the nomination, Romney would have to somehow win 90% of the remaining delegates to clinch the nomination.

Mike Huckabee will ensure this does not happen. Long derided as a spoiler to Romney's conservative base, Huckabee not only prevented Romney from a strong showing in the South - he buried the former governor in 3rd place while snatching a string of surprise victories yesterday. Huckabee's chances at the nomination are extremely slim, as he would need to win virtually all of the remaining delegates just to have a shot. His lack of support outside of the South means that this is virtually impossible and that Huckabee has no chance to win. Some conservative pundits have insisted this is enough reason for the Southerner to bow out and leave open the possibility of a Romney win, but Huckabee has turned the tables and shown - perhaps rightly so - that it is Romney who should concede defeat and bow out.

What is rather more likely is that Huckabee stays in the race - as does Romney. Romney must make the difficult decision whether to sink more of his fortune into an increasingly unlikely candidacy (some figures show he may have already exhausted $50 million of his own fortune on what has largely turned out to be a loss). Observers have noted the warm relationship between McCain and Huckabee, including the possibility that Huck's persistence is in large part an effort to cull favor with the eventual winner (McCain) for a high spot in the administration or even a veep spot on the ticket. Prospects are much dimmer for Romney. If he does not bow out within the next week, he will be forced to pour more money into a last-ditch effort to stall his downward spiral in Virginia. Given McCain's strength in the neighboring Northeast and Huckabee's power in the neighboring South, a Romney win here looks unlikely. Expect Mitt to be out of the equation by this time next week.

Perhaps the biggest losers in yesterday's Republican primaries, however, are the Conservative Pundits. Yesterday was a demonstration of their dismal failure to energize votes for Romney and away from McCain. Only time will tell if their grip on the attentions - and presumably the minds - of the conservative voters has slipped for good, but it is pretty clear that, in spite of thier blistering rhetoric to the contrary, talking heads like Limbaugh, Hannity and Coulter do not wield the power they once imagined they had.