Results From Today's Primaries

Here are some preliminary results from the primaries today:

Virginia: Obama, McCain
Maryland: Obama, McCain
Washington, DC: Obama, McCain

All victories were by sizable margins. More analysis on the details tomorrow, but it looks like the front-runners are now clear in both parties. We can assume Huckabee will remain in the race, but with losing three out of three today, there is virtually no chance that he'll actually mount a dark horse comeback on McCain. The really interesting thing to watch will be how Clinton responds. Her campaign is clearly in serious trouble, but she has shown that she is more than willing to dig in and get dirty.

Rush Limbaugh has spoken for the past couple days about Hillary's motivation. The basic idea is that Hillary has put up with Bill's scandals for so many years, and has pretended to be the dutiful, long-suffering wife, all for this moment in history. She believes it is her right and her turn for the presidency, and she will stop at nothing from accomplishing that. Limbaugh thinks that she'll utilize lawsuits to count the Michigan and Florida delegates (which I've blogged about before), as well as doing whatever it takes in the back rooms to twist the arms of the super-delegates to support her.

By the way, super-delegates are a bit of a wild card. As I understand it, there are two kinds of delegates in the primary process. The normal delegates are allocated to the winners of each primary on the basis of the votes cast by citizens. Then there are super-delegates, who are lawmakers, former lawmakers, former Presidents, etc. who can pick whomever they want regardless of who won their state's primary. On the Democrat side, the nomination will be secured by around 2,100 delegates, but there are around 800 super-delegates. At this point, the delegate count between Clinton and Obama is a dead heat, but if Clinton can twist enough arms, she'd get quite a boost.

We'll find out in the next few days.

There's my two cents.