GOP Voters Send McCain a Message

I think John McCain had hoped that after Mitt Romney withdrew and pretty much locked up the nomination for McCain that the message he would get from Republican voters would be something along the lines of "we welcome our new RINO overlord!" and the rest of the primaries would go smoothly. Not so fast, John.

Republican voters in Kansas gave Huckabee the win by a nearly 3-1 margin. Voters in Louisiana also gave the win to Huckabee, but by only two points or so. In the very liberal state of Washington McCain won but by a very small margin. Even Ron Paul got nearly 21% of the vote in that state.

What I don't understand are the thousands of voters who chose Romney, Thompson, Giuliani, Hunter or Tancredo. In Louisiana they got nearly 22,000 votes. In Kansas, less than a thousand, and in Washington Romney ended up with just a thousand fewer votes than Huckabee. Some of that could be absentee ballots which were cast prior to those candidates leaving the campaign, but I think most of them were protest votes against McCain, and quite possibly Huckabee. McCain did not win a majority of the vote in any of the three contests held yesterday.

On Tuesday we'll have the Potomac Primaries in Maryland, Washington DC and Virginia. It's going to be interesting to see if those voters are as unimpressed by McCain as yesterday's voters were.