Santorum Surges to Lead in Oklahoma

SoonerPoll.com released a survey today of that Oklahoma Republican Presidential primary, and found that Rick Santorum has surged to an impressive lead. Santorum recently attracted very large crowds at events in Oklahoma City and Tulsa following up on his victories in Colorado, Minnesota and Missouri.

SoonerPoll.com Oklahoma Republican Primary Survey (link) 

Rick Santorum - 39%
Mitt Romney - 23%
Newt Gingrich - 18%
Ron Paul - 8%
Undecided - 13% 

Poll of 300 likely Republican primary voters, taken February 8-16, with a MoE of +/-5.66%

Previous polls had shown Newt Gingrich leading the Oklahoma primary. American Research Group released a poll on the 8th that had Gingrich with 34%, Romney with 31%, Santorum at 16%, and Paul with 10%. SoonerPoll had a survey in mid December that put Newt in the lead with 33%, Romney at 14%, Paul with 4%, and Santorum at 1.5% (other candidates have since dropped out).

Oklahoma has a proportional delegate apportionment this cycle. Oklahoma gets 43 delegates this time around. Three are unpledged (OKGOP Chairman Matt Pinnell, RNC members James Dunn and Carolyn McLarty), each congressional district has three (for a total of fifteen), and the remainder (twenty five) are awarded off the statewide vote tally. In order to be eligible for delegates, a candidate must receive more than 15% of the vote statewide for at-large delegates, and 15% for congressional district delegates. If a candidate gets more than 50% of the vote statewide, he is automatically awarded all at-large delegates; the same is true for the congressional district level.

Therefore, if the final results of the March 6th vote looked like the poll above, Santorum could receive something around 12 at-large delegates, Romney about 7, and Gingrich around 6. The 15 congressional-district delegates would be awarded based on how the candidates performed in each district. Since SoonerPoll has not released cross-tabs showing their survey results on a congressional district level, I can't give a complete delegate estimate.

UPDATE: SoonerPoll has now released the crosstabs - you can view them here.

Drilling down into the results allows for rough estimates on delegate allotment off of the results SoonerPoll found. My guess would be that among the 15 congressional-district delegates, Santorum would receive about 8, while Romney would get 4, and Gingrich would take 3. Add those to the statewide at-large estimates, and you come up with this:

• Santorum - 20 delegates
• Romney - 11 delegates
• Gingrich - 9 delegates
• Paul - 0 delegates

Obviously, take these with a big grain of salt, but this should give a rough idea as how the delegates would be dealt out.