1,144

My nascent blogging renaissance has focused largely on delegate counts for the Republican nomination, so I think it's important to keep this number in mind. 1,144 is a simple majority of delegates's votes needed to win the Republican nomination at the convention this summer. The candidate who wins Florida won't be able to claim a knockout punch. Even after Florida, the winner will still have less than 7% of the delegates he'll need to win the nomination.


NB: Romney can count Huntsman's 2 delegates, effectively giving him 9 from New Hampshire on top of his 6 in Iowa. That's 15 to Gingrich's 29. As an interesting note, if we're only interested in delegates that are pledged via some sort of democratic process (either Primary or Caucuses), and we don't count super-delegates, the soonest that a candidate can amass the 1,144 delegate simple majority is on April 3rd. In order to pull that off (without help from superdelegate endorsements), a candidate would have to win every single delegate between now and then.