Mississippi---42 states down now and the scorecard is---Obama in front

Last night the Mississippi vote was reported with record turnout of over 408,000 voters, within 50,000 of the entire vote total that John Kerry received in the 2004 general election and 4 times the number that voted in the 2004 presidential primary.

Barack Obama garnished 253,464 votes (61%) to Hillary Clinton's 154,989 (37%) immediately awarding 17 to Obama (13 delegates to Clinton) where the remaining 3 will be determined in reviewing the Congressional District apportionment. It is expected that Obama will pick up those three delegates and claim the projected 20 from the state.

MSNBC has now recounted their hard count and have Obama with 1394 pledged delegates to Clinton's trailing 1242, a growing difference of 152 a slightly bigger spread than before March's highly touted Super Tuesday, (their total delegate projection now stands at 1614 (216 superdelegates) to 1498 (254 superdelegates).

As important is the popular vote spread which Obama increased it to approximately 698,657, to date: Obama 13,402,903 where is at Clinton 12,705,360. And now even if you include Florida and Michigan, Obama leads the popular vote. That total is Obama 13,979,117, Clinton 13,904,497. If you like to add in Florida (Clinton 870,986 to 576,214 a difference 294,772) and Obama still leads by 403,885. You want to count the Michigan Primary where Obama was not even on the ballot, and Obama still leads 13,979,117 Clinton 13,904,497. That said you can forget that calculation where it now appears certain that Florida and Michigan will have their re-vote by June 10th.

There is some interesting trends coming out of Mississippi on the heals of Texas, the Limbaugh factor or the "Fearful White-Republican"-vote, FWR for short. Reported on Talking Points Memo via MSNBC's exit numbers:

Republican crossover voters... made up either 12% or 13% of the voters in tonight's primary. And they went for Hillary Clinton by a decisive 3 to 1 margin.

Translating as a political scientist likes to do these numbers, one can presume that 50,000 Republicans crossed over and 38,000 of those voted for Clinton, motivated by an anti-Obama call. Now up to Texas, open primaries were experiencing a 9-10% Republican participation where Obama was enjoying that 75% advantage, until Texas. There he still got 54% but the turnout increased. But using the old numbers let us say that 30,000 participated in Mississippi's primary for nefarious reasons and of that 25,000 voted for Clinton as part of the Limbaugh or FWR factor, meaning that Obama's win could have reached 70%.