Even until recent weeks, the conventional wisdom was that Super Tuesday was going to be it: a de facto national primary that would decide the presidential nominations.
And for the Republicans, it may have been the case, with John McCain working up a lead over Mitt Romney and Mike Huckabee that’s not mathematically insurmountable, but perhaps unassailable from a practical standpoint.
But for Democrats, the horse race between Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama has just begun. Colorado, home to the Democrats’ national convention in August, will have a front- row seat.
Across the country Tuesday, voter response was overwhelming. Voter apathy, long considered a disease eating away at civic participation, was nowhere to be found.
That goes to show you that if you give people high-interest candidates and an opportunity to cast a ballot when the race is still up in the air, they’ll come out and vote.
In Colorado, which Obama carried in a big way, there were distressing reports of overflowing caucus venues that left hundreds of voters standing outside.
If it turns out to have been a widespread phenomenon, expect heated debates about the efficacy of Colorado’s caucus system.
What works well when there are just a handful of party die-hards in a room with cookies and coffee isn’t going to handle an influx of hundreds of folks who want to vote and go home. But, really, it’s a wonderful problem to have.
Even as the votes were being counted into the night, it was clear that Super Tuesday’s results would reverberate long after the delegates were apportioned and tallied.
It only promises to get more interesting from here, as super delegates and late-season primaries come into play. Upcoming Democratic caucuses and primaries in states such as Texas, Pennsylvania and Ohio will become important battlegrounds for the nomination.
Beyond those, the race for the nomination could end up in the hands of super delegates. If you’ve got only the foggiest notion of what a super delegate is, you’re not alone.
Democratic national party rules give special delegate status to governors, members of Congress, ex-presidents and vice presidents and past party officials. There are 796 of them, not including those discounted by party penalties against Florida and Michigan, which moved up primaries against party wishes.
Given that it takes 2,025 delegates to win the nomination, super delegates have become valuable wild cards, so to speak, whose votes are not tied to primary or caucus results.
Think of it as an invisible primary. The jockeying for those super delegate votes has no doubt begun.
It could make the convention in Denver a battleground, with floor fights and deal-making galore.
Super Tuesday didn’t end the campaigns. It only made them more interesting.
