Just announced: Gingrich has won Georgia. Romney leading in VA (only against Ron Paul, other candidates were not organized enough to get on ballot - duh) and Romney leading in Vermont.
Nate Silver 538 Predictions with comment from Jed Lewison:
Ultimately, Super Tuesday is like any other primary night: each campaign's goal is to amass delegates. By that metric, Mitt Romney appears on track to have a fairly good night. According to Nate Silver's latest projection, the most likely outcome tonight is that Mitt Romney ends up with 224 delegates on the night—51 percent of those available, followed by Newt Gingrich with 20 percent and Rick Santorum with 17 percent, and the rest going to Ron Paul and uncommitted.
That would be a good result for Mitt Romney's primary campaign, but mostly because the rest of the field is divided. In 2008, as Nate Silver points out, John McCain actually did much better than Romney's projected 51 percent, taking just shy of 63 percent of the delegates in play.
That suggests that while Romney is likely to be the clear winner tonight, he's going to need something closer to John McCain-type numbers to be able to claim he's effectively ended the campaign. It might be obvious to uninvolved observers that things are over if he's at 51 percent, but his rivals are unlikely to think things are over until he gets himself on track to start taking a super majority of delegates at stake.
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"Have the clean racing people run any ads explaining that giving a horse a Starbucks and a chocolate poppyseed muffin for breakfast would likely result in a ten year suspension for the trainer?" - Dr. Andrew Roberts
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