THE END OF ROUND ONE...

Round One of this year’s presidential nominating season ended Feb. 29, with the day’s voting a confirmation of the basic mosaic that has been coming into focus throughout the month.

State-by-State Results Page National charts and results from the states that have already voted.

Among the Democrats, Bill Bradley failed to get the jump start that he was looking for in Washington state, losing the non-binding Democratic primary to Al Gore by a margin of 2-to-1.

Among the Republicans, George W. Bush scored a trio of victories Feb. 29 over John McCain, but none that really broke form.

Bush’s primary win in Virginia gave him another victory in the South. His caucus win in North Dakota provided him with another victory in low-turnout, party-run caucuses. And the primary results in Washington state offered further evidence of Bush’s strength among Republican voters and McCain’s appeal to non-Republicans.

PREVIOUS ANALYSES

BACK INTO THE MOSH PIT... It wasn’t supposed to be this way. George W. Bush was expected to coast to the GOP presidential nomination, but with John McCain's success in Michigan, all bets are off.

AFTER NEW HAMPSHIRE: Two Paths Diverge… With the votes from New Hampshire tallied and in the record books, the 2000 presidential nominating campaign has moved in separate directions for the two major parties... <more...>

THE FIRE WALL HOLDS The fire wall held for George W. Bush in South Carolina, but unlike his father, who was able to use a South Carolina triumph as a springboard to victory across the Super Tuesday South, the Texas governor must do well on the road before his home region votes in mid-March... <more...>

Bush handily won the GOP primary in Washington. McCain easily won the separate "Unaffiliated" balloting among voters who did not want to participate in either the Democratic or Republican primary. And the two results combined produced essentially a dead heat. Bush led McCain by less than 7,000 votes – 351,881 to 344,933 - with nearly 200,000 absentee ballots still to be tallied during the week of March 6.

All in all, though, it was a night of triumph for Bush. Coupled with his sweep of voting over the weekend of Feb. 26-27 in Puerto Rico and the territories, the results Feb. 29 enabled him to zoom past McCain in the delegate count and regain the momentum he had lost Feb. 22 with a pair of losses in Arizona and Michigan.

In particular, his 20-percentage point victory over McCain in the Washington GOP primary augured well for his chances in California next Tuesday, where the treasure trove of 162 delegates will all go the winner of the Republican primary balloting.

But there were also some favorable signs for McCain in the voting. The Washington "Unaffiliated" vote showed his continued appeal to non-Republicans, major players in a number of primaries to come. And McCain’s success in the suburbs of Northern Virginia was a favorable harbinger of his chances in suburban-oriented states of the Northeast that will vote March 7.

A Dead Heat

McCain, though, may have missed his best chance to defeat Bush in the staggered primaries of February. Now, the competition moves to the multiple fronts of Titanic Tuesday, an event that Bush has always been presumed to be best positioned to win.

Yet while McCain was unable to score the string of victories that might have put Bush away, he at least held his own – and may actually have beaten Bush when all ballots are counted - in the aggregate tally from the seven Republican primary states that voted in February.

With ballots still being counted in Washington, Bush had 1,652,847 votes to McCain’s 1,650,719 – a differential of barely 2,000 votes out of more than 3.5 million cast.

Yet in spite of the closeness of the aggregate GOP primary vote, some of the dramatic variations within it were evident in the two primaries Feb. 29 in Virginia and Washington.

In Virginia, Bush won by landslide margins in the conservative interior of the state, paced by a 65% percent showing in the Southside Fifth District, represented by the most recent addition to the House Republican Conference, Virgil H. Goode Jr.

McCain scored on the fringes of the state – the Tidewater Second , strongly influenced by the presence of the U.S. Navy, and the two suburban Northern Virginia districts closest to Washington, D.C. – the Eighth and the Eleventh.

Even in the suburbs, though, there were strong gradations in the vote. McCain took roughly 60% in the Democratic-oriented, inner suburbs of Arlington and Alexandria, 53% in politically marginal Fairfax County in the heart of suburban Northern Virginia, and less than 50% in the fast-growing, Republican-oriented outer suburbs of Loudoun and Prince William counties. Both counties went for Bush.

In Washington state, the variation was in the partisan nature of the primaries. Bush won the Republican primary with almost 60% of the vote. McCain won more than 60% of the votes cast for GOP candidates in the "Unaffiliated" primary.

Bradley’s Lost Chance

While McCain could takes solace in aspects of the Washington vote, Bradley could not. He spent nearly a week of valuable campaign time in Washington in search of a victory that would propel him into Titanic Tuesday.

But he took less than one-third of the Democratic primary ballots and carried only one county, iconoclastic San Juan. It is a cluster of islands northeast of the Olympic Peninsula that was the only county in the state to favor the write-in candidacy of Ross Perot in the 1992 primary. (For good measure, San Juan was one of only two counties to prefer McCain over Bush in this year’s Republican primary.)

Bradley did better in the "Unaffiliated" primary, taking nearly 40% of the ballots cast for Democratic candidates. But he finished a distant fourth in the overall tally, behind all the other major candidates in both parties.

His inability to wrest independent votes from McCain – a problem for the former New Jersey senator in New Hampshire - was evident again in Washington. The incomplete tally showed McCain with nearly 180,000 "Unaffiliated" votes, more than three times the number that Bradley received.

But while Bradley stumbled in Washington, the results were not uniformly good for Gore. In 1996, President Clinton easily won the overall primary vote in Washington, a harbinger of his victory in the state that fall.

But this year, Gore ran a distant third in the overall primary tally behind both Bush and McCain, and had the lead in just two of Washington’s 39 counties (one of which was Thurston, which includes the state capital of Olympia).

McCain led in 15 counties, including King (Seattle), the most populous in the state. In general, McCain carried many of the state’s most Democratic counties as well as those most supportive of the 1992 presidential candidacy of Perot.

Bush led in the two major counties that flank King – Snohomish (Everett) to the north and Pierce (Tacoma) to the south – as well as much of the conservative interior portion of the state. One conspicuous exception to Bush’s hegemony in eastern Washington, though, was populous Spokane County, where McCain led in the overall vote.