By James A. Barnes, National Journal
© National Journal Group Inc.
Wednesday, Jan. 30, 2008

With his victory in the Jan. 29 Florida primary, Sen. John McCain of Arizona won the richest delegate prize to date in the Republican presidential race. He also quieted many skeptics who doubted that the party maverick could prevail in a nominating contest limited to registered GOP voters.

	Capturing Florida's closed primary was an important political hurdle for McCain to overcome.

The win establishes McCain as the clear front-runner in the Republican race heading into the bonanza of Super Tuesday primaries and caucuses. And McCain's strategists now believe that the momentum behind his candidacy could enable him to wrap up the GOP nomination on that date. "He has a good chance to end this on Feb. 5," said McCain senior adviser Charlie Black.

Later today, in California, it is widely expected that McCain will get another boost when former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani, who finished a distant third in the Florida primary, will officially withdraw from the Republican race and endorse McCain.

Capturing Florida's closed primary was an important political hurdle for McCain to overcome. The candidate himself underscored that, gleefully noting to his supporters at a victory party that his success had come in a state that was, "as I have been repeatedly reminded lately, an all-Republican primary."

In California, the state with the most delegates to the party's national convention in September, the Feb. 5 primary is closed to all but registered Republican voters. And the state's winner-take-all rules could yield a huge portion of the state's 170 delegates for the victor there; it is likely to be the key showdown between McCain and former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney, the runner-up in Florida. (See NationalJournal.com's Super Tuesday chart for an explanation of how delegates are awarded in California.)

The high growth, multi-media market Sunshine State shares other qualities with California, including the fact that the Golden State's Republicans have come to at least tolerate their own maverick, GOP Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger.

Parsing The Demographics
McCain beat Romney 36 percent to 31 percent yesterday, but the scope of McCain's win seemed more impressive than the margin of victory. McCain carried eight of the top 10 vote-producing counties in the primary and all five of the top five. McCain won the Miami, Ft. Lauderdale and Palm Beach "Gold Coast" bloc. He won Tampa Bay, St. Petersburg and Sarasota on the Gulf Coast. He rolled up the "I-4 corridor," winning Polk, Orange and Volusia counties (which are home to Lakeland, Orlando and Daytona Beach, respectively). And he won Escambia and Santa Rosa counties in the westernmost part of the state's panhandle region, where Pensacola is located. Romney's metro strongholds were the counties around Jacksonville, Ft. Myers and Ocala.

For Romney, the National Election Day exit poll of Florida's primary voters -- conducted by Edison/ Mitofsky for AP, ABC, CBS, CNN, FOX and NBC -- could offer a few hopeful signs. Among white voters, who make up the bulk of Republican primary voters, Romney essentially tied McCain, 34 percent to 33 percent.

It was Hispanics and Latinos, including Cuban Americans, who were the key to McCain's winning coalition in Florida. Those voters cast a whopping 54 percent of their ballots for McCain, followed by 24 percent for Giuliani and only 14 percent for Romney. The late endorsement McCain got from Florida GOP Gov. Charlie Crist dominated the news statewide prior to the primary, but the earlier backing from Florida Sen. Mel Martinez -- who was part of the bipartisan effort on immigration reform -- probably gave McCain a boost among the state's Hispanic and Latino voters, who made up 12 percent of the GOP primary electorate.

Ironically, McCain's candidacy nearly collapsed in the late spring and early summer of 2007 when he was leading a bipartisan effort to reform the nation's immigration laws, which was widely viewed by many conservative Republicans as too forgiving for illegal immigrants and their families. That was one of the main issues, if not the main issue, that Romney used like a cudgel to smash McCain's campaign in Iowa at the time.

McCain also got help from senior citizens. Among those aged 65 years or older, who made up a third of the Florida GOP primary vote, McCain won 41 percent to Romney's 31 percent. Voters who were younger than 65 basically split between McCain and Romney: McCain captured 32 percent and Romney won 31 percent.

And while McCain celebrated the fact that he was able to win a primary limited to registered Republicans, independent-leaning GOP leaning voters were still critical to his success. According to the exit poll, Republican primary voters who said that they "usually think" of themselves as independents gave 44 percent of their votes to McCain -- compared with 22 percent who cast their ballots for Romney. Among those primary voters who said they usually think themselves as Republicans, McCain and Romney evenly divided that group, 33 percent apiece.

The Key To Conservatives
But Romney still faces the critical task of consolidating conservatives behind his candidacy if he's going to stop McCain's march to the Republican nomination. The exit poll found that among primary voters who identified themselves as "very conservative" -- 27 percent of Florida's GOP primary voters -- Romney won 44 percent to McCain's 21 percent. Former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee, who finished fourth in the primary, won two in 10 of that group. But among the 34 percent of GOP primary voters who said they were just "somewhat conservative," McCain narrowly edged out Romney, 35 percent to 32 percent.

McCain won moderate Republicans by a margin of two to one over Romney. With Giuliani leaving the GOP race, McCain stands to pick up even more support from this wing of the party.

Unlike Giuliani, Huckabee, who has relatively strong support among conservative Republicans, is insisting that he's staying in the GOP contest. And even if Huckabee were to quit the race, it's not clear how much benefit that would be to Romney. According to the Florida exit poll, Huckabee's supporters' second choice was McCain -- albeit narrowly. When asked who they would have voted for if their candidate had not been on the Florida ballot, 35 percent of the Huckabee voters said McCain, compared to 26 percent who said Romney.

Likewise, the evangelical vote was split three ways in the Florida GOP primary. Among those voters who described themselves as a born-again or evangelical Christian -- 39 percent of the primary electorate -- 30 percent said they voted for McCain, 29 percent said they voted for Romney and 29 percent voted for Huckabee.

Clinton's Delegate-less Victory
The stakes were much lower in the Democratic presidential primary; the Democratic National Committee had stripped the state of all its national convention delegates because Florida's party leaders had opted for a primary date earlier than DNC rules permitted. Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton of New York won 50 percent of the tabulated vote; Sen. Barack Obama of Illinois trailed far behind with 33 percent. Former Sen. John Edwards of North Carolina, who dropped out of the race this morning, trailed in third with just 14.4 percent of the vote.

Since all of the Democratic candidates had pledged not to campaign in the state because it was violating party rules, it's not clear how meaningful the results of the Democratic contest were.

Clinton's campaign maintained they were significant, because the exit poll of Democratic primary voters showed that she essentially tied Obama among one of his strongest voting blocs: young voters aged 18 to 29 years old. She also continued to maintain a strong advantage among Hispanic and Latino voters, winning them roughly two to one over Obama.

And in a post-primary memo, the campaign's chief strategist and pollster Mark Penn claimed that whatever momentum Obama received from his smashing victory in the South Carolina Democratic primary and his endorsement by Sen. Edward Kennedy of Massachusetts has dissipated.

"The exit polls show widespread recognition of the endorsement but even so among those who decided on Election Day, a plurality of those chose Hillary," Penn wrote.

In a conference call with reporters before the Florida polls closed, the Obama team derided any effort by the Clinton camp to claim a significant victory from the results of the primary.

"The bottom line is that Florida does not offer any delegates. It is not a legitimate race, it should not become a spin race," said Sen. John Kerry of Massachusetts, who has also endorsed Obama. "It should not become part of the politics that a lot of us are trying to reject -- to suggest something that isn't true."

In her victory in Florida, Clinton handily carried most regions of the state except for the mix of 36 counties in the northern tier that stretches from Jacksonville on the Atlantic Ocean to Pensacola on the western tip of the panhandle and south to Ocala. Obama narrowly prevailed there, with about 39 percent of the vote to Clinton's 38 percent. Edwards ran third, winning 22 percent of the vote in the region. Obama captured industrial Jacksonville in Duval County; two college counties, Alachua (where the University of Florida is located) and Leon (where the state capitol of Tallahassee harbors Florida State University); and Escambia, around Pensacola.

Clinton's strength was in Marion County, which is dominated by the fast-growing city of Ocala and the hyper-growing Flagler County, north of Daytona Beach, one of the country's fastest-growing counties since 2000. Clinton won just over half the vote in both those counties.