On The Road To Inevitability

We are now less than two weeks away from the Primary Election in the state of Maryland and voting actually starts this weekend for those who want to cast their votes early.  I hear a lot from people claiming how happy they are Maryland is going to matter this time around, but is it really?  Is the nomination race already effectively over?There are many different takes the actual delegate count to this point, so for the purposes of this post, I will take the latest numbers from The Wall Street Journal which currently shows the delegate tally as such(as of 8:45pm on 3/21):

Mitt Romney 563
Rick Santorum 263
Newt Gingrich 135
Ron Paul 50
Jon Huntsman 2

There are 2,286 delegates that are up for grabs in the primary elections and so far as the numbers above show.  Right now, as the numbers above show, 1,013 delegates have been allocated which is almost half of the total delegates available.  In percentage terms, here is the current allocation of delegates:

Mitt Romney 56%
Rick Santorum 26%
Newt Gingrich 13%
Ron Paul 5%
Jon Huntsman 0%

There are still 1,273 delegates left to be allocated in the remaining primary contests.  In order to reach the 1,144 delegates required, here is what each candidate would have to obtain:

Mitt Romney 581
Rick Santorum 881
Newt Gingrich 1009
Ron Paul 1094

I removed Huntsman because obviously he is no longer contesting the race.  In pure percentage terms, this is what each candidate would have to obtain of the remaining delegates:

Mitt Romney 46%
Rick Santorum 69%
Newt Gingrich 79%
Ron Paul 86%

Any clear-thinking person looking at these numbers would tell you there is only one candidate that has any possibility of reaching the majority required to obtain the nomination.  Other than their respective home states and some of the territories that held primaries, none of these candidates have hit 50% of the vote in any primary.  Reaching 69% (as Santorum needs) or 79% (as Gingrich needs) is a pipe dream.

Romney reached 47% of the vote in Illinois on Tuesday night, which is just about the threshold he needs in the delegate count the rest of the way.  Add to this that many of the remaining states are winner-take-all such as California and New Jersey.  Romney winning a plurality would give him an even larger percentage of delegates than the 46% he needs.  At this point, other than trying to force a convention vote that I seriously doubt Santorum or Gingrich has any hope of winning, I am starting to wonder what purpose Gingrich and Santorum remaining in this race serves other than trying to sabotage Romney and hurt the end goal of the 2012 election, defeating Barack Obama.