Welcome to our coverage of the Illinois primary results where the weather has been hot and the competition for votes has been, well, sort of mildish.
Mitt Romney and Rick Santorum are fighting for 69 delegates. The pollsters have already handed victory to Romney: they say there aren't enough Santorum-leaning conservative and evangelical voters in the south of the state to outnumber Chicago Mitt-moderates. We'll find out soon enough. Polls close at 8pm ET and if the result is clear, the networks will call it soon after.
It's not meant to have got this far: it's the first time in years that so much attention has been lauded on the outcome of the presidential primary in this state.
Our indefatigable correspondent Ewen MacAskill is on the ground in Illinois, along with our commentator Gary Younge, who lives in Chicago. They're joined by our US comment editor, Matt Seaton.
There are reports of problems with the size of ballot papers. In many counties, perhaps as many as a third, the ballots were too big to fit into the automatic counting machines. This means that many ballots will have to be counted by hand.
Matt Gauntt, a blogger in Illinois and one of our panel of Illinois-based commentators for tonight, says this:
What this means is that even if they corrected the problem mid morning, which I understand a number of them did, they will still have to hand count those that were done manually before they can release the results.
The Washington Post is confident that while it may delay the official result, Romney's lead in the polls is sufficient not to delay a call.
It's the first time that Illinois has been a key primary state since … well, 1860, when some nobody named Abraham Lincoln beat Newt Gingrich*. Or somebody.
Actual historical fact: it was on this day in 1854 that the modern Republican party was founded. And who knows, maybe today will be equally memorable?**
Notes:
* Not true. They didn't have primaries in those days.
** It won't be.
The facts are these: all the polls say Mitt Romney will beat Rick Santorum like a gong. Ballot problems notwithstanding, this one isn't likely to be an all-nighter. In fact I expect this primary to be called fairly quickly after polls close at 8pm ET, so strap yourself in, it's going to be a quick one.
Not everyone is voting for Mitt Romney. Chicago-based funny lady Emily Zanotti has other ideas:
For the record, I'm writing in my cat in the Illinois primary. Not for everything. Just for President.
— Emily Zanotti (@emzanotti) March 20, 2012
Presumably the cat hasn't flip-flopped on key policy issues, such as killing mice and long naps.
If anyone out there wants a contrast to the high octane nature of US primary politics, I recommend watching C-Span 2, which is showing recorded footage of the Queen's speech to the joint houses of the British parliament from earlier today. There are bishops, lords, flunkies named Black Rod, and of course the Queen.
Queen Elizabeth II marks her diamond jubilee with a speech to both Houses of Parliament at Westminster Hall, Flummeryworld. Photograph: Ben Stansall/AFP/Getty Images
If you want to make your brain explode, I recommend flipping between that real life British costume drama n C-Span 2 and C-Span 1, where Politico Live is on with presenters currently snorting political methamphetamine. Not literally.
The key to winning Illinois is Chicago. The Greeks knew it, the Romans knew it, and now Mitt Romney knows it, because that's where all the people live.
But Chicago is a tough town – as Rick Santorum once observed:
They tell me you are wicked and I believe them, for I have seen your painted women under the gas lamps luring the farm boys.
OK so that wasn't Rick Santorum, that was Chicago's poet laureate Carl Sandburg, who famously called Chicago "Hog butcher for the world".
Preparations are made for a Mitt Romney campaign event in Chicago, Illinois. Photograph: Ewen MacAskill/guardian.co.uk
The Guardian's Ewen MacAskill knows where all the best parties are – and he's at tonight's hot ticket, the Mitt Romney victory rally in Schaumburg, on the outskirts of Chicago:
The Romney team seems to be confident. The password for wifi access at the party for those who cannot face being separated from the internet is Victory2012. In the case of Illinois, it seems to be justified. It was supposed to be a showdown but exit polls suggest it is going to be a walk-over.
It has been a beautiful day in Illinois, with residents saying the state has skipped straight from winter to summer. The exit polls say the economy has been the biggest issue and that suits Romney better than Santorum, who is still campaigning on constitutional and cultural issues.
This feels like the fag-end of the campaign, the point at which news organisations begin to scale back their commitment. The big networks are at the party tonight but fewer and fewer are bothering to cover anymore the daily rallies.
There is also a strong element of voter fatigue. While there has been a lot of television and radio advertising in Illinois, it is hard to find many yard signs up for either Romney or Santorum, in contrast with the way Iowa, New Hampshire and other early states were. It may be that voters have basically decided that Romney is going to be the nominee and any remaining excitement has vanished.
I have to say I agree with Ewen. This has the feel of the a TV sitcom show that's about to be cancelled: most of the original cast has left and the audiences are switching off.
My colleague Janine Gibson is watching Politico Live – the live-streamed results show designed for people who think the West Wing was too slow-moving – for signs of incipient insanity. Janine writes:
On Politico Live – which is just like Fox News without hair, makeup, tooth whitening, botox and clothing allowances but with PhDs in political science – the very expert panel are getting insanely overexcited about the prospect of a brokered convention.
This is obviously exactly the same as all other news channel panels, except that the Politico experts are obliged by their degrees to point out that this scenario is still incredibly unlikely.
A further sign that this Republican primary may need a fork sticking in it, due to it being done, is in that Fox News is running a story about exploding iPad 3s over the fact that people are voting in Illinois.
Hang on.... iPad3s are exploding? We may have to switch this into a "Exploding iPad3s - live blog" if this is a thing. If you or a loved one has been injured by an iPad3 bursting into flame, please forward us photos. Of the iPad 3.
In meantime: back to Illinois, which is lterally burtsing with votes. Polls close in 10 minutes. Let's hope they aren't running the election on iPad 3s.
Helpfully in case of exploding iPads, they are voting in fire stations.
James Hanner votes at a fire station in the state primary in Chicago, Illinois. Photograph: John Gress/Getty Images
So while we are waiting till the polls close: let's just watch this video mash-up.
It's a work of genius. Memo to the Pulitizer Prize committee: your work is done for 2012. Suck it, Washington Post, Wall Street Journal. This is the future of news. And it's done by some guy in Australia – Australia! – named Hugh Atkin, who tweets as @hmatkin
Also: where does that "masturbating" clip by Romney come from?
Poll have closed, the exit polls are in, and Mitt Romney seems to be doing very well, as expected, so I don't think this result will detain us long.
The Chicago Tribune is reporting that the turnout appears to be very low.
Chicago election officials predicted the lowest turnout in a presidential primary in city history.
It was 15 percent at 2pm and the previous low was 32 percent in 1996, said Langdon Neal, chairman of the Chicago Board of Election Commissioners. "It's going to be the lowest," Neal said. "The real issue is" how low.
He said he was crossing his fingers that the turnout might reach 20 percent.
The Guardian's Ana Marie Cox supplies the gags:
So it's the "lowest primary turnout in Chicago history." Even the dead people only voted once. (SORRY! LOW HANGING JOKE.) #ilprimary
— Ana Marie Cox (@anamariecox) March 20, 2012
While we wait for … something, some votes to be counted or the first exploding iPad 3 fatality, spare a thought for lonely Candy Crowley of CNN:
Sitting in suburban Chicago hotel ballroom waiting for Illinois polls 2 close and "Still The Same" is playing & I'm thinkin "exactly"
— Candy Crowley (@crowleyCNN) March 20, 2012
We love you Candy. Chin up. Unplug that iPad 3.
The Los Angeles Times explains how Illinois's political geography works:
This state is remarkably simple, from the standpoint of election geography. There is Cook County, which includes Chicago – and after L.A. County is the most populous in the country – surrounded by a number of "collar counties." Chicagoland, as the surronding area is known, makes up most of the statewide primary vote and about two-thirds of the state's congressional districts. Behaviorally, it is moderate Republican territory, though suburban conservatives of the evangelical and social variety are a growing force that should help Santorum. The rest of Illinois is "downstate," a vast, more conservative region that stretches to the outskirts of St. Louis and points south. Romney's vote will be concentrated in the Chicago area, but he spent portions of the last three days courting voters downstate in an effort to cut into Santorum's margins there.
That's all very well. Wolf Blitzer says CNN is waiting for "real numbers" before making a call. And by "real numbers," let's assume Wolf means a value that represents a quantity along a continuum, such as -5 (an integer), 4/3 (a rational number that is not an integer), 8.6 (a rational number given by a finite decimal representation), √2 (the square root of two, an algebraic number that is not rational) and π (3.1415926535..., a transcendental number).
And to think people said doing a maths degree was a waste of time. They were right: all the above was just cut and pasted from Wikipedia. Take that, maths geeks.
What am I saying? If you refresh the page and look at the top of this live blog you will see some of the fabled real numbers – about 1% of them, but real numbers none the less. So throw away those old fake numbers.
SIREN: Fox News calls Illinois for Mitt Romney. Goodnight.
Just joking. They have called it though.
Random reader Bruce Cooper emails in:
Fox could be covering iPads instead of the primary because a Romney win doesn't go with their goal of a "more conservative" winner. If Rick Santorum were winning a state they would be covering it.
Nice conspiracy theory Bruce. My theory is that they're all about the viewing figures, and their sense is that the audience isn't interested and would rather just watch Bill O'Reilly.
CNN has also called Mitt Romney as the winnner in Illinois.
So now that the initial excitement of the result has passed, let's have some actual serious political commentary. I know, that's not what you're reading this for but bear with me.
Yes, Romney wins IL, as almost everyone expected. But what is the margin? That's what we need for breathless analysis.
— Larry Sabato (@LarrySabato) March 21, 2012
It's Larry Sabato's political world, we just live in it. And the Sage of Charlotesville is right. If Mitt Romney cracks 50% in this one then that really does toll the bell for the end of this thing, even if it staggers on like a chicken with its head cut off, running around in circles spurting blood. And yes that's an image that fits the current Republican field.
Appropriately, Rick Santorum's party is being held in Gettysburg, Pennsylvania. Last time there was a big gig there, the guy with the support coming up from the south also got a hammering.
On CNN, Erick Erickson is betting that Newt Gingrich and Rick Santorum's campaigns are living on borrowed time after Romney's result tonight in Illinois: "This is the first big win he's had that we haven't prefaced with 'Yes, but...'"
So Rick Santorum and Mitt Romney are preparing to speak, with Santorum to go first, speaking to his home crowd in Pennsylvania.
How much cooler would this CNN broadcast be if @JohnKingCNN had a hook for a hand?
— Ishaan Tharoor (@ishaantharoor) March 21, 2012
Meanwhile, CNN are still going with the maps and so on. The answer to the above tweet is: yes.
Politics is a dirty business. As seen below, Mitt Romney makes a thinly-veiled reference to Rick Santorum's "Google problem."
Also, this proves that Romney likes to be on top.
Mitt Romney examines a Google logo while touring the Chicago Google headquarters with vice president Jim Lecinski. Photograph: Steven Senne/AP
Yikes. With 30% of the precincts in, Ron Paul is spanking Newt Gingrich in Illinois. There's a joke in baseball about the "Mendoza line," which defines the threshold of incompetence. On that basis, Gingrich is batting below the Pauldoza Line.
Taxi for Mr Gingrich.
Now Ann Romney is speaking, so Mitt can't be far behind.
Mitt Romney arrives with his wife Ann at his Illinois primary night rally in Schaumburg, Illinois. Photograph: Jim Young/Reuters
Mitt Romney is speaking now. "So many great friends," some of whom don't even own Nascar or NFL teams. "Wow, what a night!" says Mitt.
"This movement began on a small farm in New Hampshire back in June," recalls Mitt, forgetting that he has been running for president from 2007 onwards.
Mitt is straight into his stump speech thing. And he's just dissed his own grandfather: "He never quite made it," says Mitt. Oh that's nice, your own grandfather? Yeah, I mean, did he fund Staples? No. Did he have $250m stashed away in the Cayman Islands? No.
And we're on to Version 938 of Mitt Romney's standard line about how Barack Obama doesn't understand the American economy. "In the last three years, this administration has waged an assault on freedom," says Romney. That's not overblown rhetoric at all, oh no.
But what's this?
"We once built an interstate highway and we built the Hoover Dam. Now we can't even build a pipeline," says Romney, which is weird, since both the Hoover Dam and the interstate highway network were federally-funded works projects, the exact opposite of what Romney is banging on about.
"It is not the government that creates our prosperity," Romney goes on to say. Well so much for the highways and the Hoover Dam eh?
With 46% of the precincts reporting, and Romney's vote share is starting to come down to earth a little: it's currently just a tad over 50% and Santorum has crept up to 32% It's still going to be a blow-out of course.
You can follow all of the voting with our exciting 3D results map here – and it doesn't even need 3D glasses or anything.
Newt Gingrich isn't speaking tonight but has "put out a statement". It basically just slags off Romney for having an awesome campaign with loads of money.
Nate Silver at the 538 blog:
Romney unable to break through with key constituencies tonight, like voters who do not like Mitt Romney.
— Nate Silver (@fivethirtyeight) March 21, 2012
Sums it up really.
Oh joy, here's Rick Santorum. He has attracted a huge crowd to his event in Gettysburg. "I feel welcome back home in Pennsylvania," says Santorum, the subtext being "not like those assholes in Illinois".
Gettysburg "is a favourite place of mine," says Rick, and seems to be comparing himself to Lincoln? Yes, he is! "This election … is the most important since the election of 1860."
Let's see, so that makes Barack Obama … Jefferson Davis?
The excellent Molly Ball of the Atlantic zings Rick Santorum:
Note to Rick Santorum: The Gettysburg Address was only 270 words long.
— Molly Ball (@mollyesque) March 21, 2012
Santorum is banging on his twin themes, tying Mitt Romney to Barack Obama as moderate middle managers:
You need someone who can speak to their convictions, not just what's on their teleprompter. I don't have one here tonight.
As fate would have it, Romney was using the dreaded Republican hate figure the teleprompter, but it malfunctioned and he stumbled over his notes a couple of times, mangling Steve Jobs's name.
Back on the attack, Santorum says: "Obamacare or Romneycare, they're interchangable," to warm applause.
Rick Santorum has started babbling on about freedom, and as one all three cable channels cut him off in mid-speech.
His last words on CNN were something like "And it's on to Louisiana...." which votes on Saturday. Oh dear. According to the latest polls there, Santorum leads Mitt Romney.
According to the survey of 2,018 likely Republican voters conducted by Magellan Strategies BR, and not paid for by any campaign or political organization, Santorum was leading Romney by 13 points -- 37 percent to 24 percent, with former House Speaker Newt Gingrich, right behind Romney with 24 percent.
Meanwhile, Romney's vote share in Illinois has slipped to 47% and Santorum is up to 34%. Looking less knock-out-y with just 65% of the precincts counted.
Gary Younge has filed from Chicago and notes that Mitt Romney has finally "acquired an aura of inevitability". But with Santorum ahead by a double-digit margin in Louisiana, he doesn't bet on it lasting.
I admit that seeing the Republican party eat itself whole from the inside out has a macabre fascination. But there is an unseemly quality to delighting too much in the agony of others, even if you wish them ill. Some people have called it a circus. But circuses are fun. This is about as much fun as watching a man in a sweater vest talking about bestiality.
Every week, there's a new test. Every week, one candidate fails it, but nobody seems to pass.
So there we have it – as expected, Mitt Romney scored a big win in the Illinois primary. Romney won all the voting groups that he has won in other primaries – moderates, the well-off, suburbanites – but because there are more of them in Illinois than some other states, he got a better result.
Obviously, winning a big-ish state such as Illinois takes Romney a step closer to the nomination, and nudges Rick Santorum and Newt Gingrich (and Paul, maybe) toward dropping out.
Here's how this ends: Santorum and Gingrich don't want to be humiliated. Eventually, people will stop showing up, and the press pack will shrivel down to the local AP guy and an intern from the New York Times. Both men will want to get out before national humiliation arrives, in the form of an empty rally venue, footage of embarrassing, thinly-attended events, late-night talkshow cheap shots, Fox News not returning your calls.
Both Gingrich and Santorum will want to get out before the cheering stops. Santorum has an obvious last hurrah in Pennsylvania – but that's more than a month from now, on 24 April. If he's smart he'll fold his tent before then. Especially if he has any pretensions to run in 2016 – and politicians being politicians, he probably does.
Gingrich has a nearer Waterloo: Louisiana's primary on Saturday. Having lost twice already to Santorum in the South, the third time may be unlucky for Newt.
Although candidates always vow to fight on, the end – when it comes – come suddenly. One day Newt Gingrich will find that no one wants to carry his bags. I'm guessing that might happen as soon as next Monday. Here's hoping, anyway.