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We’re a few minutes away from the first results from the Missouri primary. We’ll have live county by county results here.
This is, to put it mildly, a weird contest. First, it’s non-binding. No delegates are actually at stake. Second, Newt Gingrich did not manage to get on the ballot. So it’s Romney, Santorum and Paul.
There’s been very little polling of this contest. But the latest poll out this morning shows Rick Santorum with a double digit lead over Romney. Add anecdotal reports of light turnout. And that makes it even more unpredictable.
8:31 PM: We’ve got a tiny trickle of results in from both Missouri and Minnesota. And they show Rick Santorum ahead in both states. But at again, at or 1%. So just the first hints. Nothing more.
9:02 PM: So in case you’re wondering why a bunch of votes just seemed to disappear in Missouri, the AP adjusted their numbers down. A bit weird. But it’s something that happens. Not something to read anything into.
As they say, we’re still really, really early. But we have 12% reporting in Missouri and Santorum is up over Romney by over 24 points. That’s a big spread even with so few results. It’s a similar margin in Minnesota, albeit with a meager 3%. If Romney loses 2 of 3 of these contests, what’s the headline tomorrow morning?
I’m looking at the county by county breakdown of the Missouri numbers here. And there are no results in from either Kansas City or St. Louis. I’d figure those have to be better for Mitt than most of the rest of the state. But but at the moment, with 23% of precincts reporting, Santorum is up over Romney by over 27%. So they’re going to have to be radically different or Mitt’s toast.
The word coming from the Mitt campaign is that Missouri doesn’t really matter because there are no delegates there and they didn’t commit time or money. The problem, though, is that Santorum doesn’t really have any time or money to commit there either. And if you’re the frontrunner, the presumed nominee, you get clobbered in a swing state just because you didn’t aggressively campaign there? That’s a very, very low standard. Santorum is clearly leaning hard on evangelicals. And really this isn’t about Santorum. It’s about Romney. Absent crushing spending and a week or so to focus on a single state, Romney seems to have a really rough time. That’s bad, especially in the Midwest where a Republican candidate has to run strong. And especially when he’s faltering in national polls versus President Obama.