Apparently, third party candidates [1] aren't the only ones marginalized in the race for President. Everyone, it seems has already decided that John McCain will be the Republican nominee. No longer are people speaking of "if McCain gets the nomination," they're now saying "when he gets it."

I understand why Ron Paul isn't given much coverage as he trails so far behind in the polls that he clearly isn't competitive. But Mike Huckabee continues to do well -- while he is still behind McCain in delegates, he continues to hold his own overall. On Super Tuesday, he did so well that he effectively casused Mitt Romney to drop out of the race. And in Saturday's contests, Huckabee won at least two out of the three states (more on that later).

While Ron Paul suffers from a lack of media coverage, Huckabee still gets plenty of press. Unfortunately for him, it's the "why hasn't he dropped out yet?" variety.

At first glance, Huckabee's chances for the nomination don't look too good -- he currently has only 234 delegates to McCain's 719. As Karl Rove pointed out, he'd have to win 83% of all the remaining delegates in order to win. But one cannot forget that Romney gathered 282 delegates before he dropped out of the race, and it is still uncertain where those votes will go. There are also a small number of "uncommitted" delegates that are floating around from the states in which one has to achieve 50% of the vote in order to get any delegates, even if you win.

So while Huckabee's chances don't look the best on paper, he's far from finished. Yet almost everyone in the political world has already begun assuming he will lose. At first, I was ready to chalk that up to people just looking at the raw delegate count and not thinking beyond that. But the more I look, the more I think that the presumption that Huckabee will lose is simply an attempt to provide momentum for McCain, in hopes that he will achieve the nomination.

While one shouldn't be too surprised that a liberal mainstream media would support McCain (over Huckabee, at least), I'm not sure why many top Republican party leaders are so ready to discount Huckabee, especially with the widespread dissatisfaction that conservatives are feeling toward McCain.

Several top party members have already called Huckabee, and asked him to drop out of the race "for the good of the party" -- rationalizing (as Romney did when he dropped out of the race) that Republicans need to unite behind a candidate that can actually win.

Worse still is what happened in the Washington caucus. Apparently, the state Republican Party chairman Luke Esser announced that McCain had won the race [2], when only 87.2% of the precincts had reported. Sounds innocuous until you realize that his announcement meant that they stopped counting the rest of the votes -- and at that point McCain was only winning by 242 votes. Huckabee's campaign is currently investigating challenging the count.

While the race for the Republican nomination obviously isn't as close as on the Democratic side, I still think it's only fair that everyone wait and see how things play out. Making predictions is one thing, but speaking of future events with certainty is never a wise move, as the 2000 Presidential election demonstrated.

And while it is still unknown if Huckabee has any real chances of winning his party's nomination, one thing is clear: "it ain't over till it's over"...