In an interview taped yesterday for Inside City Hall, Howard Dean expressed opposition to a brokered convention if the Democratic primary contests fail to produce a candidate with enough delegates to win the nomination.

Dean told Dominic Carter he thinks there will be a nominee by March or April, and if not, "we're going to have to get the candidates together and make some kind of an arrangement."

Transcript after the jump.  read more »

Hillary's Clinton's microscopic victory in the combined popular vote from last night's primary--7,347,971 to 7,294,85--fails to take into account the caucuses that were held in Colorado, Minnesota, Kansas, Idaho, North Dakota and Alaska. All of those contests were won--overwhelmingly--by Barack Obama.  read more »

Barack Obama’s campaign seems to have accomplished two things in the days leading up to the Super Tuesday primaries. It positioned him to battle Hillary Clinton to an electoral stalemate. It also further weakened the declining position of the super-duper Democratic bundler.

Not that they still don't impressively roam the political earth —at Hillary Clinton's "victory" party last night at the Manhattan Center Studios, some of her most loyal and successful fund-raisers were there wearing campaign buttons – but they simply can no longer compete, at least in current circumstances, with the millions of dollars raised by small donors on the Internet.

"The biggest thing from the campaign perspective is all the money that is raised by the people actively trying to raise it is dwarfed by orders of magnitude by the amount that is raised on the Internet," said Obama supporter Orin Kramer, a private equity investor and one of the big names in New York-area fund-raising."  read more »

Michael Bloomberg was, characteristically, critical of the presidential race but emphatically not critical of any one candidate in his first public appearance after the Super Tuesday primaries.

At a press conference in Brooklyn this morning, Bloomberg told reporters, “There’s still three Republicans in the race. Huckabee did reasonably well. Romney certainly didn’t get knocked out. McCain did very well. So there’s a real horse race there. On the Democratic side, Hillary and Obama are still very much in contention. This is Democracy playing out and that’s good.”

More after the jump.  read more »

Following John McCain’s victory in Florida last week the chorus of McCain-hatred grew louder on talk radio shows and on many conservative blogs.

Rush Limbaugh declared that McCain was not conservative and unacceptable as a candidate. Formerly respectable conservative figures took delight in criticizing McCain’s war record—yes, his war record—by tallying up the number of planes he had lost in combat. Ann Coulter and James Dobson, a social conservative leader and head of the Focus on the Family organization, declared McCain so indistinguishable from Hillary Clinton, the featured villainess in any conservative drama, that they would vote for her or stay home.

In short the McCain villifiers doubled down on their bet that they could derail McCain and lift their favored alternative, Mitt Romney, to victory.  read more »

It looks like Obama may have more delegates than Clinton now, although her campaign disputes the math. [Ben]

Still no definitive results from New Mexico. [Albuquerque Journal]

Up next, the Potomac Primary! [AP]  read more »

A major development late in the night turned Super Tuesday 2008 into a near-perfect tie between Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton. But the advantage going forward may lie with the insurgent.

Just minutes after Hillary Clinton was declared the winner in California, a powerful symbolic victory for her, media outlets reversed field and declared Missouri—which had been trending toward Hillary all night—for Barack Obama. And with that, Obama laid claim to a large state that had been expected in the run-up to Super Tuesday to fall into his opponent's column—something he had failed to do in Massachusetts, New Jersey, Arizona and California.

Both candidates can point to numerous achievements for the day.  read more »

It was a live blog! But now it's an account of how the networks, web sites and local papers around the country covered Super Tuesday.

12:59: OK, we're approaching the six-hour mark, so let's wrap a few things up. Chuck Todd just came onto MSNBC, and based on his infinitely magical formulas, has concluded it's looking like a plus-four-delegate night for Obama (that would be 841-837). But: He said that once the superdelegates—who are still skewing towards Clinton—are factored in, she'll be able to say that she has an overall delegate advantage.

The major papers are explaining the split-vote with the same headline.  read more »

Each of the Republicans can claim some kind of victory tonight, but the big winner is clearly John McCain-–with a major assist from Mike Huckabee.

John McCain won the most delegates today, with a tally that could reach as high as 600, depending on how California shakes out (it has more than half of the number needed to clinch the nomination). McCain did win the most states, but his delegate total was additionally padded by victories in some large winner-take-all states, like New York and New Jersey. He can also claim a win in the South (Oklahoma), along with a string of close second-place finishes in that region (which netted him a bundle of delegates, since those states award their delegates proportionally). His California victory makes for a powerful statement for the kind of day he had.  read more »

With 97 percent of the vote tallied, Barack Obama has taken a 3,000 vote lead over Hillary Clinton in Missouri, reversing the night-long trend in Clinton's favor and causing news outlets who had called the state to pull back their projections. A win in Missouri would represent Obama's marquee victory for the day, a large Midwestern state where Clinton was leading in the polls right up to election day.

UPDATE: Obama wins it.