Opinion: Maybe the rain rusted the calculators

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Washington state Republican Party chair Luke Esser got himself a lecture via CNN a little while ago from Mike Huckabee, with the former Arkansas governor fuming over Esser’s decision late Saturday to stop counting results in that state’s very tight GOP caucuses.

With John McCain ahead by a couple of percentage points, the party stopped the tally at 87% counted. The Huckabees hollered -- including top strategist Ed Rollins -- and the Washington Republicans started counting again. The count apparently is continuing, and Huckabee obviously is hoping to catch up and land a clean sweep of the weekend Rpublican races.

The caucuses also gave continued life to Ron Paul, who, with 20.6%, was 5 points behind McCain in the incomplete tally. (Maybe the conspiracy theorists in that camp will argue Esser stopped the count to deny Paul a much-needed victory.) The folks at Talking Point Memo have more of the details, including other allegations of voter disenfranchisement -- gasp! Elbows were thrown!

You might say Huckabee was seeing red, but in this case it was a ‘red’ flag.

-- Scott Martelle