The spin doctors are already trying to paint last night’s results into a myriad of custom masterpieces, but I wanted to churn something out myself about the results.

Personally, I wish the voter turn out was getting reported more. It was record breaking in most places, especially for a primary.

Since the delegate awards are proportional on the Democratic side, “winning” a state isn’t as important as the margin of the win. This too is going to be misleading to the average voter while watching the news.

On the Republican side, the big shock was how well Mike Huckabee did.  Clearly the Republican base is still disenfranchised from their nominees, and the religious vote in the South turned out to keep the Huckster alive.

As a disenfranchised Democrat, I’m quite excited about how things went for Obama.  He pulled more state “wins” than Clinton, but more importantly (as noted above) he split the delegates.  Including super-delegates who are already pledged to one candidate or another, Obama is only behind Clinton by 93. *That’s my count as of 9:30 am EST.  (New Mexico still hasn’t been decided either.)

I think that this is spectacular. Though I’m an Obama supporter, and was hoping for big things, I still expected to be a couple hundred delegates behind Clinton this morning.  I never expected him to pick up mostly white states like MN and UT.  I bought too much into the talking heads on TV telling me how much race is effecting this race.  –But if you look at the exit poll data, something I predicted just before MySpace pulled down my old blog page is ringing true.  Hillary’s base has become older and elderly women.  Sure, she pulled votes with the Hispanics and Asians which helped win CA, but clearly her momentum is in that high-voter-turnout demographic of older ladies.

I can’t discount race entirely. Hispanics and Asians helped Hillary.  Obama dominated the black vote.  –But he also won white males and women under 40.  This gives me great hope for the weeks ahead.

I never expected Super Tuesday to end this race.  I did expect Clinton to do a lot better.  I knew she’d win MA and NJ. Any spin to the contrary today is just that: spin.  She polled ahead by many points in both of those states, except for a couple of days ago.  With as flawed as polls have been this year, you have to look at the data from the last couple of months as a whole, and discern some averages. 

While I had hoped Obama would win CA, and that could be spun for him today as a big victory, I’m satisfied with the fact that he was a close second, not to mention that he won 40% of Clinton’s adopted home state of NY.  I’m proud to say that Obama won my voting district in Buffalo.  He didn’t win all of the city, but he won our section. I was also proud to see he did well in my former home of CO.

As I said, I expected Obama to be a couple of hundred delegates behind Clinton today, so I am both relieved and hopeful. Let’s not forget that at this time last year, everyone thought Hillary Clinton was inevitably the next President of the United States.  We Democrats in the Obama camp have launched a strong opposition to that. No matter how this thing is spun, they can’t belittle that.

The next round of primaries will be interesting to watch, to say the least. Spin will play a big part of this thing. Obama’s momentum can only be stopped if his supporters become apathetic. We have to prepared to stay enthusiastic and energized about this campaign into the August convention.  This race is going to force a brokered convention, which is exciting to me.  We actually have a chance for real change.

Like any political junkie in America, I’m exhausted today, but more than ever I believe that, yes, we can.