Making the most out of Michigan

Mitt Romney's camp is sifting through the Michigan numbers to make the most out of its primary win as possible.

So is Ron Paul's, out of his fourth-place finish.

The Romney camp issued a memo this afternoon arguing that he is in a "strong position" to win the Republican nomination with a list of figures:

He leads in delegates; has more total votes than Rudy Giuliani, Mike Huckabee, Paul, and Fred Thompson combined in the first four contests; and led in Michigan among conservatives, pro-life voters, and evangelicals. If Romney is the nominee, he would make Michigan competitive in the general election. And McCain did far worse in Michigan than eight years ago.

While Paul was a distant fourth in Michigan, with 6 percent of the vote, his campaign manager noted that Paul did better than Rudy Giuliani, whom he also defeated in Iowa, and Fred Thompson, whom he beat in New Hampshire. In the three major races so far, Paul's vote total is 30,000 more than either Giuliani's or Thompson's.

"If I had predicted that result when this campaign started almost twelve months ago, I would have been laughed out of the room by the so-called experts," campaign manager Kent Snyder said in a statement this afternoon. "Currently there is no front-runner and this race is wide open.

So wide open, in fact, that some are already speculating about the first brokered national convention in six decades because no candidate will have enough delegates to clinch the nomination before Republicans gather in Minneapolis-St. Paul in September.