The Race Is Far From Over

Who is winning the GOP race for president? Well, we actually don't know. The mainstream media continually insists that the race it all but over and that Mitt Romney is the victor, but in reality, these claims are only based on conjecture. At the end of the day, we don't know for sure because the race for delegates is far from over.

What are delegates? Delegates are ultimately responsible for electing the President. Yes, it's this group of people who form a gathering called the "Electoral College" that decide the president, not the people's vote.  Although this system may seem shocking at first, here is how it works:

• Some states have what are called "bound delegates". These delegates are assigned to whoever wins their state.
• Other states states have delegates are "unbound"--meaning that they can vote for whoever they want to when the time comes.

Right now, according to many news agencies, Romney is the clear leader in delegates. However, as Ben Swann said in a March 8th "Reality Check" video entitled The Real Republican Delegate Numbers, "Where do those numbers actually come from? Well, about half of them are guesses." Thus, because there are many unbound delegates, the numbers indicating who is winning the race are actually just approximations. As Swann goes on to explain, of the the first 20 presidential contests, 7 of them were non-binding straw polls--meaning that the delegates in these states can vote for which ever candidate they want regardless of who wins the popular vote.

As a whole, this provides some explanation for why Santorum, Gingrich, and Paul are still in the race. Even though main media outlets show them all trailing hundreds of delegates behind Romney, these numbers are by no means set in stone. In addition, if any of the current candidates were to drop out, that candidate's bound delegates would become unbound. This could potentially give any one of the candidates the extra boost needed to get the nomination.

At the end of the day, it comes down to this: the race is far from over. In fact, as Jesse Benton (Ron Paul's campaigner manager) pointed out in a Mar 26 MSNBC interview: on May 29th and June 5th Texas and California (respectively) will have their primaries, putting almost a third of the nation's delegates up for grabs that week. The media says the race is winding down, but really, it's still going strong.