The 35,000 who attended the caucuses favored Deval overwhelmingly. Among committed delegates, about 2/3 favored Deval, and Reilly's own daughter failed to win a delegate seat.

Reilly's only strong area was in Boston, where he used Menino's support to his advantage, but even this isn't as encouraging for the TR campaign as it could be. First, Menino apparently is easing away from TR, so come election day the Menino-machine may not be an advantage at all. Secondly, only committed delegates can be counted in one camp or the other, and in my ward the delegates were not committed yet were 100% Deval supporters.

While this is all good news from my point of view, I did read one disturbing sentence in the Globe's story:

"Several voters praised Reilly's appeal to centrist voters, who could be key as Democrats try to win the governors' office after a 20-year drought"

The last time Democratic voters tried to pretend they were professional political strategists, John Kerry won Iowa. And we all know how that turned out. (To be fair, if someone said that to me I would say, "Presidential elections are a referendum on the incumbent, any reasonable candidate would have gotten approximately the same number of votes as Kerry." But still, I don't like the thinking.)