Wall Street Willie And The Delegate Math

If Wall Street Willie (aka Willard Mitt Romney) looks a bit unhappy and confused in the picture above, there's a good reason for it. So far, 23 states and 3 territories have held their primaries/caucuses and 835 delegates have been won by the four candidates. A few months ago, most political pundits had thought the race would be all over by now. It isn't, and it has become clear that although Romney has the delegate lead, his campaign has a serious weakness. As the returns from Kansas showed last Saturday, he still has not won over the social conservatives (the teabaggers and evangelicals).

Here are the delegate totals so far (according to RealClearPolitics):
Mitt Romney...............455  (54.49%)
Rick Santorum...............199  (23.83%)
Newt Gingrich...............117  (14.01%)
Ron Paul...............64  (7.66%)
TOTAL DELEGATES...............835

There are a couple of ways of looking at this. One, the idea being floated by the Romney campaign, is that none of his opponents can get enough delegates to win the nomination. That is probably true. There are 1451 delegates left to be decided. Santorum has the most delegates right now at 199. That means he would have to win 942 of the remaining delegates, or 64.92%. That's not likely, and the odds are even longer for Gingrich and Paul.

But there is another way to look at it. His three opponents together have 380 delegates (45.51%). The three of them together would just need 764 (52.65%) of the remaining delegates to throw the nomination into a brokered convention -- where anything could happen. That is within the realm of possibility. And the longer Romney goes without showing some real strength among base voters, the more encouraged the anti-Romney forces will get (and the harder they will work).

I think the odds are still in Wall Street Willie's favor to get just enough delegates to avoid a brokered convention. But his campaign has shown us that the Republican Party is a very divided party. And if Romney wins, there will be a lot of unhappy people in the party. Can he win them over after getting the nomination? He'd better. If very many of them are mad enough to stay home on election day or vote for a third party, it could be disastrous down-ballot for the Republican Party.