BUSH & McCAIN: Dead Even At the Ballot Box...

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

Two things could be said about the Republican primary vote on the eve of Titanic Tuesday. It is close and it is fractured.

Delegates are the coin of the realm in winning presidential nominations, but the popular vote is instructive. Every nominee since Democrat George McGovern in 1972 has been his party's top vote-getter in the primaries. And every candidate that has been elected president since then has been the clear-cut favorite of voters in his party's primaries.

PREVIOUS ANALYSES

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... <more...>

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. <more...>

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...>

Yet with the Republican primary season now a month old, the nationwide tally is virtually dead even - 1,652,847 votes for George W. Bush, 1,650,719 votes for John McCain - a differential of barely 2,000 votes out of more than 3.5 million cast in the seven states that have voted.

Still, the evenness of the vote masks a full-blown case of political schizophrenia.

There have been partisan divisions. Overlay the exit polls from February's Republican primaries with the actual returns and the results are stark. Bush leads McCain among self-described Republicans by more than a half million votes. But McCain leads Bush among independents by more than 300,000, and among Democrats who have participated in the Republican primaries by more than 200,000 votes.

Round One: Chart of Primary Votes and Delegates Won in February

And in spite of the closeness of the overall primary vote, there have been sharp geographical distinctions. Bush has dominated south of the Mason-Dixon line, McCain to the north, with the unique primary system in Washington state producing victories for both.

Another noteworthy aspect of the Republican primary balloting in February: Where Bush and McCain won, they each won decisively. Bush triumphed in Virginia, South Carolina and Delaware by margins ranging from 9 to 25 percentage points. Of the 18 congressional districts in these three states, Bush won 14.

McCain's Southern beachheads were on the fringes of the region - a pair of military-oriented districts in the Virginia Tidewater and along the coast of South Carolina, and the two districts in the Northern Virginia suburbs that are closest to the nation's capital. In the more conservative interior portions of Virginia and South Carolina, Bush won by huge margins.

But elsewhere, the Republican primary voting produced an entirely different story. McCain took Michigan, New Hampshire and his home state of Arizona by margins ranging from 8 to 24 percentage points. Of the 24 congressional districts in these three states, McCain won 22.

Bush's lone success was in two Republican-oriented districts in western Michigan, the only two districts in the state where Bob Dole defeated Bill Clinton in the 1996 presidential election.

McCain won Detroit, its suburbs and virtually all of Michigan's major population centers. And in New Hampshire and Arizona, McCain defeated Bush in every county.

Rather than serve as a tiebreaker, the Feb. 29 balloting in Washington encapsulated within one state the political schizophrenia of the month's primary voting. With absentee ballots still being counted the week of March 6, Bush led McCain in the Republican primary by 85,000 votes. But in the separate balloting among unaffiliated voters who did not want to align themselves with either the Democratic or Republican parties, McCain led Bush by nearly 80,000 votes.

Combine the two votes and Bush and McCain are in a virtual dead heat in Washington, a microcosm of their primary battle nationally throughout the month of February.

Ultimately, McCain 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.

But even if that comes to pass, the first month of Republican primaries has been more like a political War of the Roses than the cakewalk to coronation that it was widely expected to be.