Hypothesis

[essentialsaltes]

The appeals court decision on prop 8 helped to squirt Santorum into prominence.

One of the states was Colorado, and the legal decision made a great deal of reference to Romer v Evans, which resulted from Colorado's Amendment 2. Then again Colorado was his narrowest margin of victory 40/35 over Romney.

Also interesting that no delegates were on the line. MN and CO were caucus-y things, and the MO primary was scheduled too early to count, according to the party's ruleses.

Comments

[ian-tiberius.livejournal.com]

Some of the states have switched to proportional delegates, but not all. I was reading about this back when Newt looked like he was doing really well; some people were pointing out that a lot of the Southern states went to proportional representation, which works against candidates expected to do well in the South.

Wikipedia (naturally) the state-by-state breakdown.

Looks like most states are proportional, but even those aren't necessarily quite in proportion to the actual vote count (every state sets its own rules, and I believe a lot of them award extra delegates to the winner.

And a brokered convention would push just about every happy button I have, from "political science major who's never gotten to observe a brokered convention" to "Republicans are self-immolating on live TV."