Some questions about Washington

McCain had one win yesterday. Washington.

We're starting to lose confidence that the Washington state GOP is ever going to report the last 17% of the results of today's caucus. Perhaps they think if they wait long enough people will just forget they held one and they'll just pretend it didn't happen. That said, let's look at the results with 83% reporting ...

Huckabee 24%
McCain 26%
Paul 21%
Romney 16%
Uncommitted 12%

First thing you have to note is that 74% of caucuses showed up to vote against their all-but-certain nominee. Romney's showing a couple days after dropping out of the race is pretty impressive. And uncommitted even put in a respectable number. The truth is that beside Huckabee's feeble candidate, of the remaining three, one has officially dropped out, another has said he's shifting his focus to his congressional campaign and the third isn't even a person.

Almost anyone they put up can tally real numbers against McCain. We'll know how serious this is on Tuesday.

Not an inspiring win, especially with such a large loss in Kansas.

But what happen last night?

As you know, John McCain lost two of the three contests yesterday. He was losing narrowly in Washington state and then pulled ahead by a narrow margin (less than two points) toward the end. But then with 87% of the returns counted, the Washington state GOP, which runs the caucuses stopped releasing results. That left us and a lot of other news organizations in a bit of a quandary last night since it looked like McCain was going to pull it off. But as late as 1:30 AM on the east coast promised new results kept failing to materialize.

Then over night the Washington state GOP put out a press release announcing McCain the winner based on the 87% returns. Now, I think it would be borderline for a media organization to declare one candidate a winner when the margin separating first and second was 1.8% with 13% of the results still uncounted. But for the officials holding the election to declare the result on that basis is simply bizarre. But that's what they did.

The release says final results are not expected to be available until Monday.