Yeah, yeah, so I'm a bit behind on posting about the several contests that were held on Saturday for both the GOP and the Democrat presidential candidates. I was visiting family, and I was busy doing other things, like driving long distances.

So here it is, two days later. Be happy.

Huckabee trounced, hammered, clobbered, whooped, crushed, or otherwise soundly defeated John McCain in the Kansas caucuses on Saturday. The results?

Huckabee    60%
McCain       24%
Paul           11%

As for Louisiana, Huckabee barely squeaked out a popular vote victory over McCain, but failed to capture above the 50% mark required to collect the state's 20 committed delegates that were up for grabs:

Twenty Louisiana delegates are at stake in the Republican competition. However, those delegates only are committed if a GOP candidate gets 50 percent or more of the primary vote. Another 27 delegates on the Republican side aren't committed no matter the outcome of the primary election.

Those twenty delegates that neither McCain or Huckabee picked up automatically on Saturday because of the lack of the 50% minimum will be decided at the state's convention.

As for Washington State (may you forever live in infamy just because), the current results (with 96% of precincts reporting) have McCain leading by 2.3% (several hundred votes) with 25.6% of the vote. There has been some hooplah (including a possible legal investigation on the part of the Huckabee campaign) regarding the Washington State GOP chairman Luke Esser projecting McCain the winner of the caucuses with only 87.2% of the votes in, declaring that all the votes need to be counted, and that there's something fishy going on. On the surface, it looks like another Washington elections "Oops, I did it again", but in reality, there were many rural precincts that hadn't reported their results, and wouldn't be able to do so until today, Monday.

The thing about the GOP caucuses in Washington State is that they're more like a presidential preference straw poll of sorts as far as the day-of results go. The main purpose of the caucuses is to elect delegates to move on to County Convention, where delegates will be further elected to proceed to State Convention, and from there are the delegates to the Republican Nation Convention (in the Twin Cities, this year) are elected. You can write whatever name of a candidate you want as you sign in to your precinct, but you are not held to that preference by any means. If you were elected a delegate to county convention from your precinct, you could in theory switch your vote or change your mind any old time you wanted to. The caucuses are the first step in a process of speeches and persuasion, ultimately leading up to electing delegates for National Convention. So why do they report the tallies of the presidential preference "votes"? Probaby because the Democrats actually have something meaningful to report on caucus night (e.g. delegates), and the GOP feels like they have to have something to report as well.

For the GOP in Washington State, half of the delegates to be awarded will be awarded on February 19th, based on the results of the presidential primary. (The democrats choose all their delegates at caucus.)

As far as the Democrats' side of things played out, let's just say that Hillary should be worrying about the seeming new inevitability of an Obama nomination. Obama swept all the contests on Saturday, most of them by an overwhelming margin. Last I checked, Hillary still leads in total number of delegates, but the margin is slim. Apparently Obama held a rally at the Key Arena in Seattle on Friday, and around 20,000 people were waiting outside the venue hours before he even arrived. Just a reminder to everybody: Obama is not the Messiah.

-Cydney

Cross-posted on The Celebrity.