By Lazaro Aleman
Special from ECB Publishing, Inc.
As everyone must know by now, Mitt Romney won the Florida Republican presidential primary on Tuesday, Jan. 31, statewide getting 46 percent of the votes to the 32 percent that went to his chief rival, Newt Gingrich.
Those percentages translated statewide into 771,842 votes cast for Romney and 531,294 cast for Gingrich, with Rick Santorum receiving 222,248, or 13 percent, and Ron Paul receiving 116,776, or 7 percent.
That, however, wasn’t the case in Madison County, where a majority of Republican voters chose Gingrich over Romney.
Results released by the Madison County Elections Office on Wednesday morning showed that Gingrich received 492 votes here, or 46.99 percent of the votes cast, to Romney’s 266 votes, or 25.40 percent.
Meanwhile, Rick Santorum received 209 votes here, or 19.96 percent, to come in third place, and Ron Paul received 68 votes, or 6.494 percent.
If Madison County Republican voters were not in step with the majority of their fellow Republicans across the state in favoring Gingrich, they were in step with most neighboring counties and others of the smaller, rural counties across the state in their choice.
The statewide tabulations show that 33 of Florida’s 67 counties favored Gingrich over Romney, including Franklin, Gadsden, Jefferson, Taylor and Wakulla in the Big Bend area.
Florida being a winner takes all state, Romney’s victory assured him the state’s 50 delegate votes for the August nominating convention in Tampa. It requires 1,144 delegate votes to win the GOP nomination. Romney now has 87 delegate votes to Gingrich’s 26. Santorum has 14 and Paul has four.
It’s estimated that Romney spent $15 million in support of his campaign to secure the Florida victory.
The contest next heads to Nevada, Colorado and other western states.
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