Mitt Romney made a strong showing in Colorado on Tuesday night winning 59 percent of Republican caucus-goers to his side in the GOP presidential preference poll. In the last 48 hours before caucus Republicans were deluged with automated phone calls for Romney urging them to go to caucus and vote for Mitt.

“I got at least 5 calls from the Romney campaign on Monday,” said one GOP caucus participant supporting Romney Tuesday night. “My neighbor tells me he got 3 today.”  

And those calls worked.

Thanks in part to Colorado’s 100,000 members of the LDS church, Romney swamped all comers with over 33,000 votes of 55,000 cast.

But the better question to delve into today is why Romney’s campaign decided to put resources into Colorado’s Republican presidential beauty pageant when there were no delegates at stake here on a night when half the delegates to win the nomination were up for grabs elsewhere.

Even some Romney caucus supporters seemed confused on Tuesday night.

“If the vote is a non-binding, straw poll, I guess I don’t know why I’m here,” said one woman in her mid 50’s attending caucuses south of Denver. “Can anyone explain to me why we’re out here tonight if it doesn’t count?”

That’s a good question. But no one should expect an answer anytime soon. Most of the media seems oblivious to the rules of Colorado caucuses.

Both the Rocky Mountain News and the Denver Post, in stories that covered the Romney win, failed to mention that it was a presidential straw poll with no delegates at stake. The AP reported on Romney’s Colorado win by saying that “[at] stake in Colorado were 43 Republican …delegates selected through the caucuses.”

Wrong. Delegates to the national convention won’t be selected until the end of May. And even then they are “morally bound to vote for whoever is selected during the Republican primary in August.”

Consequently many of the GOP presidential campaigns avoided Colorado completely.   

When asked about the lack of visibility In Colorado from McCain’s campaign, one McCain insider from Colorado said: “We’d love to have campaigned in Colorado. It’d be a great state for us. It has a lot of military and it’s a small geographic. And we have a lot of volunteers. But why put the resources into it now? Our McCain people here were calling into Florida and Georgia and California, states that had delegates at stake last week and on Tuesday. States we won too.”

One national consultant contacted by the Inside Edge said that it was apparent last week that Romney was going to have a tough time winning the popular vote in key states, so his campaign concentrated on caucus states so they could at least rack up a few wins on Tuesday.

When asked if he thought the Romney campaign knew Colorado had no delegates at stake he said: “Probably. But they just wanted to have another one in the win column. They probably figured the press had no idea. Then again maybe it was a detail that got lost in the tsunami.”

“It doesn’t matter either way,” he concluded. “Mitt lost states by big margins in the popular voting. His closest two-on-two race was in California where he lost by eight points. Devoting resources to Colorado was just an indication of how desperately behind he really was.”

But others say that his devotion of resources in Colorado was a major blunder taking resources from other key states, just as he blundered when he pulled out of South Carolina, essentially allowing McCain to take South Carolina away from Huckabee.   

A look at the primary results shows that only in Missouri did Romney really have a chance to beat McCain in the nine primary contests McCain won. In Missouri, Huckabee trailed McCain by about 9,000 votes while Romney was about 20,000 off the mark in the finally tally.

When asked to analyze the Romney win in Colorado our McCain insider asked in puzzlement:

“What win? What did Mitt win here? Explain it to me.”

Your explanation is as good as ours.