It’s Election Day in New Hampshire. 

Amid all the chatter and blather about the Iowa caucuses last week and the New Hampshire primary today, it is important to remember just what it is all about.  The purpose of the primary process is for a POTUS candidate to collect enough delegates to the Republican National Convention to receive the Presidential nomination.  In a recent post here, I indicated that we are going to start tracking delegate counts and reporting on them regularly.  After initially visiting MSNBC and reporting those numbers, newlondoncalling commented that CNN had different counts.  Curious, I launched a closer investigation of the matter and quickly discovered that there are a whole bunch of different numbers floating around out there.  At that point, it was time to go to the source - the Republican National Committee.  The results: 2380 delegates were allocated to the national convention. The eventual nominee will need the votes of national convention delegates totaling 50% + 1 in order to be the nominee. Based upon the 2380 delegates allocated, the eventual nominee will need 1191 delegates in order to gain the nomination.

Furthermore, the delegates from Iowa are actually “unbound”, meaning that they can vote for whomever they choose at the Convention, though they are generally elected to be delegates based on their support for certain candidates.  So, other than the media bounce, it is too early for Governor Huckabee to count any delegates in his column.  In Wyoming, the caucus claimed as a victory for Governor Mitt Romney of Massachusetts isn’t much of a victory after all, as all 14 delegates from that state are unbound.  As a matter of fact, the New Hampshire delegates up for grabs today will be the first 12 “bound” votes of the entire process - and even then, the delegates will be divided proportionally amongst all of the candidates garnering a threshold 10% of the vote.

What does this all mean?  The value of the “beauty contest” exceeds the actual balloting contest that will occur at the Republican National Convention on Sept 1 -4 in Minneapolis.  Nonetheless, we will continue tracking the head counts during the course of the process.