GOP voters in Nebraska and Oregon voted Tuesday in their respective primaries and handed some more delegates to Mitt Romney.
Complete State-by-State Results: CNN Election Center
Report from Politico:
With almost nothing at stake, Mitt Romney easily won primary contests Tuesday in Nebraska and Oregon, edging closer to formally clinching the GOP presidential nomination.
Taking more than 70 percent of the Nebraska vote with three-quarters of precincts reporting, the presumptive GOP presidential nominee won by nearly 60 percentage points over Rick Santorum, who ended his campaign a month ago. Ron Paul, who announced Monday that he would cease active campaigning in states yet to hold their primaries, nabbed just 9 percent.
In Oregon, the Associated Press called the race for Romney with just over a quarter of precincts reporting in the vote-by-mail state. There, Romney led by a similar margin, nearly 60 percentage points over Paul.
President Barack Obama did not face primary challengers in either state following the embarrassment of a federal inmate winning 40 percent of the West Virginia vote last week.
For weeks the presumptive nominee, Romney largely ignored the two late-voting states, making but one public appearance between them recently: A rally in Omaha last week marked Romney’s only public 2012 campaign event in the state, which was one more than he held in Oregon.
Not much more to gain in these primaries besides the magic number of 1,144 which is what Romney is still shooting for. Looks like he’ll have to wait until into June before he can theoretically pull that many delegates and seal up the nomination. At this point, the delegate counts are speculative until most state GOP organizations hold their state-level conventions and dole them out. The “R12DC” numbers on our 2012 Delegate Tracker reflect only delegates which have been officially allocated.
