Update on Louisiana's caucuses

This is from a commenter over at race408.

Louisiana’s social conservatives created the winning “Pro-life, Pro-family” slate in early January largely because we didn’t know if Fred was still going to be a candidate at the time of our caucuses (turns out that he wasn’t, by a few hours). Because we had almost all the state’s social conservative leaders for Fred, we were also able to stave off Huckabee by use of this “pro-life, pro-family” slate. I was really pleased with the win last night, as it’s not easy to beat McCain, Romney, and Paul without a candidate, but that’s what we did.

About 90 percent of the pro-family slate was actually Thompson supporters. If Fred were to jump back into the race, he would almost certainly pick up all 47 of Louisiana’s delegates (the whole point of LA’s complicated system was to have an early vote while still not losing half our delegates like all the other early states have). That would put him AHEAD of McCain in the delegate count and only narrowly trailing Romney.

This is what the Campaign Spot over at NRO says:

This Louisianan's take contradicts that of the state party, who contended there was overlap between the pro-family slate and McCain.

I bounced the above comments off another campaign, who said it was plausible that most, or at least a good chunk, of the "Pro-Life, Pro-Family" folks were Fredheads.

Wow, sounds pretty convoluted to me. But this must really want to make the Fred supporters want to scream. It's so strange to me that Fred dropped out now. Ace is posting that Carl Cameron at Fox News is saying Fred was only in it for theV.P. spot. I find that hard to believe, but if you were supporting Fred you have to feel pretty betrayed by it, if true.

So maybe Fred could have won last night and built momentum? I guess we will never know.

One more thing. The Corner has this:

Ron Paul finished second. His supporters reportedly mobbed the 11 polling places, but many of them could not participate because they were not registered Republicans. They were required to cast provisional ballots, many of which will not count. (The provisional ballots are part of the reason for the delay in tallying the results.)

Romney came in third, despite what appears to have been more than a token effort. Huckabee's failure to participate is baffling — he could have easily won this one, and it would have been a nice bounce for him after his loss in South Carolina.