It's just about over and it's been a very interesting night. At the end of the night, the wins brokeout this way:

McCain: New York, New Jersey, Connecticut, Delaware, Missouri, Illinois, Oklahoma, Arizona, and California.
Romney: Massachusetts, Minnesota, North Dakota, Utah, Montana, and Colorado.
Huckabee: West Virginia, Georgia, Alabama, Arkansas, and Tennessee.

Biggest Winners are Mike Huckabee and John McCain. With Mike Huckabee, he made a case for being in the race and finally won some states oustside of Iowa. Another reason he wins, when you scan FOX, CNN, MSNBC; all three networks spoke of how he rose from the ashes tonight. The drum beat from the conservative talk show hosts has been "A vote for Huckabee is a vote for McCain." Not so, admitted Laura Ingraham on FOX News when she rightly said "Huckabee is taking votes away from McCain and not Romney" while minutes later Karl Rove agreed. Megyn Kelly says "clearly Mike Huckabee had a great night."  John McCain has to be counted as a winner as well, how else can you describe it when he won the majority of the states and delegates. He is now the clear front runner, especially when the pundits say Huckabee has no chance at the nomination. Huckabee has continually been counted out this entire election cycle by a very powerful group, to no avail. Regardless of how he does, he is written off. McCain's victory speech was, perhaps, the first official reach out to the other two campaigns and Townhall.com's Matt Lewis makes a great case that his CPAC speech will be as important to him as the College Station Religion speech was to Romney.

Biggest Loser clearly is Mitt Romney. Sean Hannity said all day long that McCain and Huckabee colluded together to deny Mitt Romney any momentum with the West Virginia vote, but an argument can also be made that the conservative talk radio team has colluded with the Romney campaign to try and convince voters to move their vote to Romney. My take is, neither is colusion, it's just politics. A secondary argument could be made that Romney is hurting Huckabee more than Huckabee is hurting Romney. Should the calls begin to ask Romney to leave the race and support Huckabee? He can still, however, make the argument he has more voters and more delegates supporting him than Huckabee. That should be enough for Romney to stay, except he now is losing the battle of expectations when Bill Kristol and Howard Fineman are saying it's time to leave the race. Good spin from the Romney campaign, though, when they say "On the issue of electability, this is a two-man race. Huckabee has a certain inability to bring together fiscal and national security conservatives.” Hmmm, the voters in the south don't feel this way. More arrogance from a campaign and candidate that leads in that category.

Consider a Romney/Huckabee pairing? The cry from the majority of conservative talk radio hosts has been, as said earlier, a vote for Huckabee is a vote for Romney. I think the more that you look at it, Huckabee is actually hurting McCain more. The question that these hosts must ask themselves now is, who do they dislike more, McCain or Huckabee? Mark Steyn gives us a hint with this: "Over on the GOP side, it was a choice between Weak & Divisive or Weaker & Unacceptable. Doesn't bode well for November."  Who do they think will do more damage? Now would be a perfect time for the Romney and Huckabee camps to talk about a "corporate merger." Imagine what would happen to this race if these two put aside their differences and joined together. Put together these two campaigns and look out.

Winner Take All vs. Proportional Delegates. Early indications are that McCain will get roughly 554 delegates, Mitt Romney 259, and Mike Huckabee 155. However, make every state a winner take all and the delegate count looks very much different with McCain picking up 423 (-131) with Mitt Romney (-42) and Mike Huckabee (+62) both coming in at 217. Huckabee would clearly have benefitted from a full slate of winner take all states.  Great strategy move by McCain to take 6 WTA, Romney 2, and 1 for Huckabee.  Imagine the race with all states being WTA.

Second look at the numbers. John McCain received 48.5% in the states he won. Mitt Romney is skewed by Utah, which he received nearly 90% of the vote...take that away and that number falls to a more realistic 50%. The problem with Huckabee is, he didn't come close to reaching a clear majority, spliting the vote in each state he won with nearly a third going to each candidate.

The Romney Surge didn't materalize after all. Let the whining begin. Mark Steyn writes "the heartland spoke last night and about the only message it sent was that, no matter what the talk radio guys say, they're not voting for a Mormon no way no how." What simple minded ridiculous talk is this, that the southern states are a bunch of bigots. You knew that it was only a matter of time before the "it's anti-mormon bigotry" card would come out, give Steyn credit for being the one to get in the bigot bandwagon first. It's par for the course for those in the Romney campaign and their surrogates.

At the end of the night, what happens next? No one leaves the race, Romney is already spinning the future primaries setting up well for them. Then again, that was the same spin they layed down after Florida. Huckabee reafirmed he is a force in the south, but still his inablilty to do anything more than get the most votes and not a majority of votes in his wins is a bad barometer. McCain just racks up votes and delegates. It's like Groundhog day, the voters looked at their shadow and we' get six more weeks of campaigns.