Coburn tartly notes that although Congress hardly needs 5,500 earmarks — half of last year’s total — the president’s goal would be met if Republicans themselves quit earmarking. That fact goes far to explain the Republicans’ current and future minority status. ~George Will

It is one of the stranger aspects of the GOP’s collapse that presidential candidates and mainstream pundits identify earmarks as the gravest and most damaging example of power’s corrupting effects on the party and one of the chief reasons for their loss of the majority.  Certainly this sort of spending does not help an already ruined reputation for fiscal responsibility, but as a diagnosis of the real souce of the political problems of the party it is ludicrous.  What is most bizarre of all is that the use of earmarks, while prone to frequent abuse and excess, is one of few examples in recent years in which elected Republicans could be accused of attempting to use their power on behalf of their actual constituents.  That there was virtually nothing else on the agenda during the 109th Congress and nothing else done, whether to constrain government in the interests of citizens or to make it work on their behalf, might explain the Republicans’ minority status more effectively than yet another sermon on the evils of pork.  The fixation on earmarks reflects the exhaustion of policy ideas in the GOP, it reveals the stubborn blindness among Republicans to just how politically perilous their foreign policy has become in the last five years, and above all it drives home how truly disconnected the party has become from its constituents that it thinks the utterly insider question of earmarks has been a major influence on voters’ decisions.

Granted, endorsements are not usually major factors in the outcome of an election, but what does it say about the limited influence of Sam Brownback among local conservative activists and also about McCain’s credibility gap that Huckabee is leading the Arizonan by 40 points in the Kansas caucuses?  A very old (May 2007) poll from Kansas showed 18% for Brownback and 13% for McCain, while the latter right now is drawing a little over 20%, which means that most would-be Brownback supporters turned to the candidate who knocked Brownback out in the wake of Ames rather than vote  for the man Brownback endorsed.  This is a completely unsurprising outcome, but the extent of McCain’s defeat will be seen as a repudiation of the likely nominee by one of the first states that can cast votes for the reduced field.  The hill Huckabee must climb is still simply too high, but it appears that I (and many others) misjudged Huckabee in assuming that he was acting as McCain’s running dog.  Whatever the positive effect of Huckabee’s campaign on McCain’s chances, Huckabee’s intent appears to have been something else all together from the beginning.

There are some other things that I need to work on today, so blogging today will be light, but you should take a look at what The Economist‘s Democracy in America blog had to say about the CPAC panel where I appeared with Ross and James.  Thanks again to my fellow panelists, our moderator Mark Henrie, ISI and our audience for a very enjoyable discussion.

Romney lost statewide, as we already knew, but more remarkable is the number of districts he has lost. He lost many of them by thin margins, but that is not much consolation. It appears that he has lost almost all, except the 21st, 49th and 52nd (which he has won) and possibly the 42nd, which is very close and has not finished reporting. 4 for 53 is not what I would call a successful outcome. The 21st is a Republican-held district covering eastern Fresno County; the 42nd is Gary Miller’s district covering Orange and San Bernardino; the 49th is Darrell Issa’s northern San Diego district; the 52nd is Duncan Hunter’s district in San Diego. In the 21st, 49th and 52nd, stalwart Giuliani voters who still backed the mayor saved Romney from losing those districts as well–Giuliani and McCain’s votes together there outnumber Romney’s. “A vote for Giuliani is a vote for Romney”–I wonder why that one never caught on? Meanwhile, some stalwart Thompson voters may have weakened Romney in at least four districts, if you assume that Thompson voters are likely Romney supporters (I am skeptical, but it is possible). There is no way to spin this as anything other than a major defeat for Romney, for whom remaining competitive in district-by-district delegate allocation was vital.

Remarkably, Huckabee only got 10% in Hunter’s district, while he received as much as 16% in the Democratic 43rd and 16% again in the 21st that Romney has won (as clear a sign that Huckabee is not siphoning off Romney votes as you can hope to find in California). The pattern from the 21st seems to keep recurring in many of the other districts: where Huckabee scores well, McCain wins by smaller margins or fails to win and his share of the vote decreases, and where Huckabee is weaker McCain’s margins and share of the vote increase. That is not true in every case, but this is what happened in many of the districts.

Looking at the race nationally, I wonder when the anti-McCain movement figures will be sending a thank you note to Huckabee for keeping the race open for another couple of weeks. Had McCain won the states Huckabee took last night, his lead would be almost insurmountable now. As it is, there is still an outside chance of fighting on if McCain’s rivals were so inclined.

By Republican strategist Alex Vogel’s calculation, Mitt Romney is giving Gramm a run for his money. The former Massachusetts governor has spent $1.16 million per delegate, a rate that would cost him $1.33 billion to win the nomination.

By contrast, Mike Huckabee’s campaign has been the height of efficiency. Delegates haven’t yet been officially apportioned, but roughly speaking, each $1 million spent by Huckabee has won him 20 delegates. ~The Trail

Maybe the Romney campaign needs to bring in some people from Bain Capital to advise them on how to stop these cost overruns and inefficiencies.

It seems to me that this is hard to discern from exit polls. First, the exit polls aren’t measuring why people voted one way or another, but which candidate they supported and which demographic groups they belong to, so the only thing we can know with any certainty is the level of support, or lack of support, from those groups assumed to be more likely to have reservations about Mormonism than others. For instance, in Georgia, 72% of evangelicals voted for someone other than Romney. Roughly the same held true in Illinois, and it appears that Romney did relatively better in Illinois overall than in Alabama because the evangelical bloc was a much smaller part of the electorate. Given that polling has usually shown that about one third of evangelicals and at least a quarter of all demographic groups would not vote for a Mormon, this large vote for non-Romney candidates among evangelicals could be related to anti-Mormonism, but it is impossible to isolate that factor when other explanations are available. Maybe the evangelicals who supported Huckabee identify with him, and those who supported McCain are drawn to the putative “front-runner” or they are impressed with his biography–who can say? You would be able to find out only if you tried to get some answers about their reasons for voting one way or another.

This is an inherently flawed way of assessing the existence of anti-Mormonism, and the only way to gauge it properly would be to ask voters rather rudely after they say they didn’t vote for Romney, “Hey, did you not vote for Romney because of his religion?” Answering a pollster who asked you that might be difficult for many people, who don’t want to appear prejudiced (even if their opposition to Mormonism is based in disagreement and not prejudice), so even those results might be misleading. As it is, we have no such information. It certainly seems possible that among the 60-odd percent of voters who supported someone other than Romney there were many motivated at least partly by anti-Mormonism. The point is that we can’t possibly know this based on information that does not even attempt to measure motivation.

As of 11:00 Central today, Romney has won just three primaries all year and all of them are effectively his “home turf.” All of his other wins have been caucuses, many of them not strongly contested by his rivals.

P.S. It’s hard to gauge the outcome from county results, but so far every county that has reported shows a strong showing for McCain and a fairly anemic Romney result. It’s not out of the question that Romney wins few or no districts.

P.P.S. Is it too early to call on Romney to drop out so that he stops splitting the conservative vote? Maybe not.

By the way, if you’re wondering why New Mexico hasn’t started reporting results yet, it’s because the Democrats screwed up and set up too few polling places and had too few ballots available. According to my folks back home, the wait to vote in Rio Rancho has been measured in hours.

Exits indicate that McCain will win the overall California vote. Obviously, how it breaks down district by district will determine whether Romney has been utterly humiliated or simply beaten. McCain is running strongest in central California, the Bay area and L.A. County, while Romney does best in southern California and the northern coast. McCain’s margins in both L.A. County and the Bay area are larger than Romney’s in his best areas, which means that McCain may be more competitive in Republican-held districts than some expected.

P.S. CNN has already called California for McCain. So much for Romney’s late polling surge.

Of course, that doesn’t make any sense, but neither has the constant refrain from the Romneyites that a “vote for Huckabee is a vote for McCain.” This is the same line they tried once before when Giuliani was perceived as Romney’s major adversary. What they can’t seem to grasp is that, at the very least, a vote for Huckabee is almost certainly a vote against Romney, and it also does not noticeably help McCain. In every state that Huckabee has won tonight, except for West Virginia, McCain was in second, which suggests that Romney would have lost these states anyway, since a large portion of Huckabee’s voters seem to prefer McCain, which means that almost every Huckabee victory is a victory denied to John McCain. Rejoice, ye anti-McCainists! Your champion has arrived, and he is the one you cannot stand.

Even a West Virginia win would have been consistent with Romney’s pattern, which seems to have been replicated in North Dakota, Montana and Minnesota (and maybe Colorado): he wins caucuses that can be dominated by a heavily funded and well-organised campaign, but when it comes to winning over masses of voters he just can’t deliver. His entire campaign has been geared towards appeasing activists and insiders, and yet he has the gall to wrap himself in a populist mantle.