Hillary Clinton won the Pennsylvania primary today, capitalizing on her appeal to women and working class white voters. The tendencies of the various Democratic Party voting blocs held to the consistent pattern they have followed throughout the primary season. The nearly 10-point win means Clinton will gain about 20 convention delegates on Barack Obama, leaving her still some 120 delegates behind. The bottom line for the nomination picture is that the perception of viability continues to rise for Clinton but the delegate math still does not add up for her.
According to exit polls Clinton won among women 57-43% while Obama won the men by only 52-48%. Clinton carried the white vote about 62-38% and the Catholic vote 70-30%. Catholics were about 31% of the voters. She also won big among senior citizens 66-34%. Obama overwhelmingly got the black vote, won the 18-29 age group handily and the 30-44 age group narrowly. As usual, he did well among the college-educated and those with higher incomes. Hispanics made up less than 1% of the electorate. In short, with a few percentage differences, the standard demographics that prevailed in neighboring Ohio and New Jersey that also produced 10% Clinton victories reasserted themselves in Pennsylvania.
Sounding confident and in command, Clinton vowed in her Philadelphia victory speech to carry the fight onward. With 408 pledged delegates at stake in the seven states and two U.S. territories still to vote, there is no realistic chance of her overtaking Obama in that count. She would need to garner about 65% of them, and the Democratic proportionality rules eliminate that as a real consideration, especially considering Obama will be favored to win outright in North Carolina, Oregon, Montana and South Dakota. Clinton should do very well in West Virginia and Kentucky, while Indiana currently appears too close to predict. Still, barring an unlikely total collapse of the Obama effort, he will go to Denver with the lead in pledged delegates.
Clinton's only path to the nomination is therefore her hope of taking Indiana, rolling up big wins in the other Ohio Valley states and convincing 2/3 of the 300 remaining uncommitted superdelegates to break her way. She aims to do this by arguing that Obama is a flawed candidate who cannot win the populous swing states and will lose to John McCain in November. Her surrogates such as Terry McCauliffe were busily making this case as the results came in tonight. Her fire is directed mainly at Obama; she has to get past him first and worry about McCain later.
Obama's post-election speech illustrated the contrast. His critiques concentrated on the general election, zeroing in on the failures of the Bush Administration and tying McCain to them by highlighting the Arizona senator's support for many of the Bush policies. Obama does not want to alienate the Clinton voters, knowing he will need them later to beat McCain. The two approaches seem to be having effect. Exit polling indicated that 30% of Hillary's supporters said they would vote for McCain over Obama while only 16% of Barack's voters said they would vote for McCain over Clinton. This scenario is creating nightmares for party strategists, raising the possibility that if unity cannot be restored after the convention Obama may be too wounded to defeat McCain. There is a real danger that if Clinton does not win the nomination herself her main effect may be to take Obama down with her.
7 comments:
I agree with your last comment. I believe Hilary will consider it a victory if Obama does not win the general election.
I do not see her winning on pledged delegates and will be very surprise to see the super-dems swing to her, I think that would hurt them for elections to come.
I found this site while looking for something else but I'm glad I did. I was trying to find out if anyone was trying to track and analyze the effect of Rush Liebaugh's evil game of Operation Chaos, where he is encourageing republicans to switch registration in order to vote for Hillary thereby prolonging her hopes and reasons to remain in the race. This of course would keep the clueless democrats at each others throats and suck up monetary resources while the republicans laid low and restocked for the comming battle. A supremely evil strategy if it had any real effect. As I have said for about two decades-democrats are clueless, republicans are evil.
I am not a Rush listener.
This idea of his, if true, is just plain stupid. I bet he also wants people to "tell the truth" in the political arena, and then he encourages people to become liars for our entertainment.
The strategy outlined where Hillary takes Obama down with her in November, actually works to her advantage, since the economic woes, if worsened in four years will allow her to run again as the Democratic standard bearer against McCain. But I'm hoping that Democrats aren't stupid enough to vote for McCain just because their candidate didn't get the Democratic nod. I for one, won't vote for McCain. All we'll get is four more years of the same garbage that we've had for the last 8 years.
Glad you dropped in, Will. There was a lot of reporting on Limbaugh's strategem in Texas, where it may have provided a couple of percentage points to Clinton's 4% popular vote margin there. I haven't seen anything on it lately, though. I wonder why the main stream media has lost interest in it. I check in on Limbaugh every now and then and he is still exhorting his followers to register Dem and vote for Hillary.
Meanwhile, Sean Hannity had Newt Gingrich on his radio show today and the two of them were literally chortling over the Democratic race. Gingrich was making Clinton's case, pointing out she was winning the big states except for Illinois and that she would make the tougher candidate in November.
Webfoot makes two good points. First, Clinton would, of course, benefit from an Obama defeat in the general, if her only concern is running again in 2012, though she keeps saying the Democrats will unite behind the nominee and that she will support Obama fully if he is the one.
Second, a real Democrat would be nuts to vote for McCain. Clinton and Obama are close on the issues while McCain livess in a different political universe.
If it were not for the inane, incessant cable news coverage (that somehow seems unavoidable despite all my efforts), this long campaign could actually be seen as a blessing for Obama. Let's face it, he is a younger, newer political figure, and he probably can benefit from being forced to learn what it takes to win majorities in all different kinds of states and settings. I find him extremely compelling, but for some reason he doesn't come across well to older Democrats, Hispanics, and blue collar workers. Why is that, and what's the solution? He learned in Pennsylvania that you can buy your way into their hearts. It can't really be his policies are unacceptable to these groups, since his policies are pretty much the same. I'll leave it up to Obama to figure out what is missing, and if he can, he'll be that much more ahead of the game in November.
Your blog convincingly demonstrates that Hillary cannot hope to overcome Obama's lead. Obama will be the nominee.
(The only danger of post-convention disarray among the Dems is if the superdelegates ignore the majority vote of its primaries and caucuses and swing the nomination to Hillary. That's the only way I can envision a convention that would really turn off the people.)
So, the way I look at it, Hillary is proving an invaluable sparring partner before Obama's big show this fall.
Indeed the optimistic and most likely, probable development is that most Democrats will come home and vote for Obama in November if he is the Democratic nominee. Then he will count on his stronger appeal to independents to complete his run to victory. There are as many reasons to predict an Obama win over McCain as a Clinton win.
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