Who Got the Most Votes in Tuesday's Primaries? Not Mitt Romney

But it wasn't anywhere near as good as that of another candidate, Barack Obama.

In the District of Columbia, the president's Democratic primary total was at 51,289 -- more than 15 times Romney's Republican primary total.

In Maryland, where Romney was struggling to get to the 117,000 mark in the GOP primary, Obama was surpassing 275,000 in the Democratic primary. That way better than a 2-1 margin for the president.

And in Wisconsin, which got the lion's share of attention on this primary day, Romney's 305,000 GOP total (with 97 percent of precincts reporting) was barely better than Obama's 285,000 total on the Democratic side.

Add Obama's votes up across the three jurisdictions that voted Tuesday and he's almost 200,000 votes ahead of Romney.

Obama has done better in individual states than Romney before. In Ohio, for instance, the president's Democratic primary vote was dramatically higher than Romney's Republican primary vote. But that was just one state on one night.

Tuesday night provided a broader measure from three very different voting jurisdictions. And that measure was strikingly positive for the president.

In fact, the president won more than 10 times as many District of Columbia votes as all the Republican contenders combined. That's not exactly shocking, as the district is a Democratic stronghold.

But in Maryland, a state that sends Republicans to Congress and that has elected a Republican governor in recent years, Obama won substantially more votes than all the Republican presidential contenders combined.

In Wisconsin, Obama was running just short of even with Romney, and he was proving to be a dramatically more successful popular-vote-getter than Rick Santorum or Newt Gingrich or Ron Paul.

The numbers provide a sobering reminder for the Republicans. Turnout, even for their intensely fought contests, remains low. And in most cases, Romney still does not win a majority of the votes. The GOP's "enthusiasm gap" has been much discussed during the course of the 2012 competition.

But the extent of the gap was writ large across Tuesday night's results in three very different jurisdictions.

There is no question that Obama has also wrestled with enthusiasm-gap issues. That was especially true in some early primary states, such as New Hampshire.

But as the Republican race has dragged on, Obama's numbers on the Democratic side have improved.

So it was that, on what was hailed as a big night for Mitt Romney, the Republican frontrunner still did not get a majority of Republican votes cast. He got far fewer votes than Barack Obama.