Presidential primaries Tuesday
BY PETER A. SUTTERS JR. INDEPENDENT WRITER
Polls at Nantucket High School open at 7 a.m. Tuesday for the Massachusetts Presidential primary, "Super Tuesday" in the Commonwealth and in 20 other states.

The Bay State has 121 of nearly 1,700 delegates up for grabs by the Democrats and 48 of just over 1,000 for the Republicans.

Registered voters of a specific party will have to vote in that party's primary, while independent or undeclared voters can choose to vote in either the Republican, Democrat, Green-Rainbow or Working Family Party primary.

Polling, which have been rather limited in the state, show Democratic Senator Hillary Clinton with a doubledigit (15 to 30 percent) lead over Barack Obama. Former North Carolina Senator and former Vice Presidential Candidate John Edwards is even further behind. On the Republican side, most recent polls show former Massachusetts Governor Mitt Romney with a 15 to 20 percent lead over Arizona Senator John McCain. According to realclearpolitics.com, other Republican candidates are all polling in single digits in Massachusetts.

As of Tuesday, Clinton was leading the delegate count for the Democrats with 249 to Obama's 179, with Edwards at 58. On the Republican side, Romney is leading with 59 delegates, followed by McCain with 35, former Arkansas Governor Mike Huckabee with 30, Texas Congressmen Ron Paul with four and former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani with just one delegate.

The Democrat who will represent the party in November will need to amass 2,025 delegates while the Republican candidate needs 1,191.

Obama took the all-important early momentum with a surprising win over Clinton in the Iowa Caucus. Polls had him leading by as many as 10 percent in the first in the nation primary in New Hampshire, but he lost the popular vote in a close race that saw both Obama and Clinton walking away with the same amount of delegates.

The small number of delegates held by New Hampshire is nowhere near as important as the momentum a campaign gets from a victory there. Clinton rode that momentum to take a victory in the Nevada Caucus, but the tide of the first woman to be the party's nominee was pushed back by a resounding victory in South Carolina by Obama.

On the republican side, Huckabee, a former Baptist minister, took the Christian Conservative vote in Iowa and won his only state of the contest so far. McCain repeated a 2000 victory in New Hampshire, while Romney won his home state of Michigan. McCain then went on to take South Carolina and Romney got all eight delegates in

Wyoming. I

NANTUCKET POLITICAL PARTY ENROLLMENT

Registered voters
7,998
Registered Democrats
2,154
27%
Registered Republicans
1,487
19%
Registered Independents
4,258
54%