March 10 Kansas + miscellaneous islands primary/caucus **results thread**

[Mr. Morden]

Above: Matt Romney (son of Mitt) arrives in Guam last night.  He will speak at the territorial convention, where RNC convention delegates will be chosen.

It may still be Friday afternoon in the USA, but it's Saturday morning in the Asia/Pacific region, so the contests in Guam and Northern Mariana Islands are today.

Saturday, March 10 contests:

Kansas caucuses:

http://ksgop.org/caucus/

Caucuses begin at 10am Central / 11am Eastern.  Results must be reported to the the Kansas GOP headquarters by 5pm Central / 6pm Eastern.

http://edition.cnn.com/election/2012/primaries/state/ks

AP results

Guam territorial convention:

http://mvguam.com/local/news/22594-romney-son-to-visit-guam-woo-gop-.html

Convention begins at 9am Guam time, and votes will be tallied by noon, Guam time.  Noon Saturday Guam time = 9pm US Eastern time on Friday night.

Northern Mariana Islands territorial convention:

Voting is between 7am and 7pm local time:

http://www.saipantribune.com/newsstory.aspx?newsID=117170&cat=1

They're in the same time zone as Guam, so 7pm Saturday local time = 4am Saturday US Eastern time.

Virgin Islands caucuses:

http://vigop.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/09/Rules-of-the-Virgin-Islands-Republican-Caucus-Approved.pdf

Caucus balloting begins at noon Atlantic time / 11am Eastern, and ends at 6pm Atlantic time / 5pm Eastern.

Wyoming county conventions:

Wyoming county conventions also wrap up on Saturday.

[Mr. Morden]

So yeah, the Guam convention starts in a little over an hour, and then results should be tallied about three hours after that.  But I don't know where they'll be reported.

And as mentioned, Mitt's son Matt Romney is speaking at the Guam convention.  He was also in the Northern Marianas yesterday to speak with local GOP leaders.  None of the other campaigns have sent any surrogates in person, but Santorum had an hour-long conference call with Guam Republicans a few days ago.

[Mr. Morden]

Some guy on Twitter who claims to be at the GOP convention in Guam writes:

http://twitter.com/#!/Anthony96931

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Still waiting for confirmation from some official news source.

[Mr. Morden]

Pacific News Center reports on Twitter:

link

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So I guess Romney gets more delegates out of Guam than he got out of New Hampshire?

[Mr. Morden]

Pacific News Center reports on Twitter:

link

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So I guess Romney gets more delegates out of Guam than he got out of New Hampshire?

Only 6 are tied to today's caucus.

True, though if every single person attending the convention voted for Romney, then he must be getting the super delegates as well (since they presumably attended the convention).  So that's 9.  How many does Romney have out of New Hampshire?  About the same number?

[Mr. Morden]

OK, looks like it wasn't quite unanimous on the first ballot.  The RNC external affairs director tweets:

link

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[Mr. Morden]

OK, the AP now has a story on this, so we don't just have to rely on Twitter:

link

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[Mr. Morden]

This is really an f'd up way to pick a nominee. I have no problem with these small territories having some representation at the convention but 9 Delegates each?   Way to many.

But they have zero voting representatives in Congress and zero electoral votes, so this is their one opportunity to influence national politics.  The least we can do to make it up to them for their underrepresentation in general elections is let them keep this overrepresentation in the party nomination process.

[Mr. Morden]

Voting continues in the Northern Mariana Islands (commonly abbreviated CNMI, so we don't have to type as much) for another hour or so.  A few hours ago, Jason Osborne (who, again, works for the RNC) tweeted:

link

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No idea what fraction of the vote that represents, but it doesn't look good for the not-Romneys here.

[Mr. Morden]

Final results in NMI (posted via Twitter from the guy at the RNC):

Romney 87%
Santorum 6%
Paul 3%
Gingrich 3%

This is my only news source for this, since the major news outlets aren't covering this.  (And the local news outlets in NMI seem to be kind of a joke.)  CNN confirms that Romney wins both Guam and NMI, though doesn't give percentages:

http://edition.cnn.com/election/2012/primaries/dates/20120310

Kansas caucuses begin in less than four hours.

[Mr. Morden]

Polls close in the Virgin Islands in about 40 minutes.  Not clear how long after that before we have results.

[Mr. Morden]

Newt dropping out actually nets Mittens a few delegates per Nate Silver. Well, about 10 delegates net if Newt hadn't been in the race to start with, and not much if Newt drops out now. It is obvious when you think about it. If Mittens with everyone around is on track with the supers to get an absolute majority of the delegates, it doesn't matter who has the other 45% to 49% of them or whatever. In short, this whole if only one "conservative" were in the race meme against the suspiciously moderate Mittens (I have to laugh every time I hear that one - I'm a moderate - Mitttens isn't - period), has been and remains way over hyped. There is no there, there. It only matters in absolute winner take all states, like Florida, where Mittens on his own one on one would have won anyway, since he got 46% on his own, and gets about a quarter of the Newt votes to boot.

Not really.  It also matters in any state that's WTA by congressional district.  Especially going forward, now that there are going to be more states with WTA by CD + WTA at large beyond April 1.  With Gingrich in the race, Romney can win quite a few CDs with just ~35 to 40% of the vote.  But if Gingrich is out, then that's no longer the case.  In the other post by Nate Silver, he talks about how Santorum can only beat Romney if he starts doing so well that he wins the majority of delegates in states like California.  Obviously, he's more likely to win more delegates in CA (and Romney's likely to win fewer delegates in CA) if Gingrich isn't in the race, pulling more votes from Santorum, given how the CA delegate allocation works.

This is why whether Gingrich decides to drop out or not this week is the key question going forward in terms of how quickly this process gets wrapped up, and whether Romney is able to have a "clean victory" in primary season or not.

[Mr. Morden]

Thank you Guam, from Mitt and myself.

 

I'm sure the entire island of Guam feels blessed to have Winfield's thanks.