The Aftermath of Yesterday’s Primaries
Slate has a fun Delegate Calculator, where you can experiment with different vote totals for the remaining primary states and see how they affect Obama’s and Clinton’s pledged delegate totals. If you play with the red slider across the top, you can see that Clinton would need to win all of the states listed by an average of 58% to Obama’s 42%, in order to exceed his pledged delegate count (averaging all the states like this is an oversimplification of the situation, but it gets the point across). To get within 100 delegates of him (a number I’m arbitrarily picking, where she might credibly argue the difference is too small to be a deciding factor), she’d need to average 53%. (Note the calculator still lists yesterday’s states, where her average percentage wasn’t anywhere close to 58%, and wasn’t even 53%, so the percentages she’ll need going forward are likely even higher than what I just outlined.)
I don’t know the dynamics of the upcoming states in any detail, and I don’t think they’ve been broadly polled yet. But just doing a quick mental comparison of them to demographically similar states, my gut feeling is that the only states where Clinton has a good chance of winning are Pennsylvania, Indiana, West Virginia, and Kentucky, with Obama likely to win the other 8 contests. I don’t see her getting within even 100 delegates of him. Even with her boost from yesterday, she is actually likely to fall further behind, even if she wins a few more big states (with the proportional allocation of delegates, such wins will only net her a handful of delegates; Obama’s strengths in the more numerous smaller states has a powerful cumulative effect).
That means her path to the nomination is not through the popular vote, but through the superdelegates. The only way she can persuade the superdelegates to overturn the overall popular vote is to get traction with attacks that thoroughly undermine belief in Obama’s capabilities. She needs to decimate the superdelegates’ confidence in his ability to lead the party effectively in the general campaign. This means she will have to really bloody Obama without getting equally bloodied in return. We got a taste of these kinds of attacks in Ohio and Texas, and it’s safe to say it will only get nastier.
This strategy is of course predicated on Obama not swatting back the attacks effectively. Obama’s advisor David Axelrod said today, “If Sen. Clinton wants to take the debate to various places, we’ll join that debate. We’ll do it on our terms and in our own way, but if she wants to make issues like ethics and disclosure and law firms and real estate deals and all that stuff issues, as I’ve said before, I don’t know why they’d want to go there, but I guess that’s where they’ll take the race.”
Regardless of who emerges the winner, the big concern for Democrats is that this will get really, really ugly, and do serious damage to both candidates as the general election quickly approaches. An exciting intra-party contest is good for the party to a point, as it keeps a media focus on the contest, and sharpens the candidates skills before the real battle with the other party begins (for example, Obama has become a much better debater, and the Clinton campaign has learned when – and when not – to put Bill on the campaign trail). But when the issue debates are largely exhausted and the contest begins to turn largely on personal attacks, that is when we are beyond that point. The last thing the Democrats need is lingering, bitter factionalism in the party, and a candidate that is badly tarnished even before the hardcore mudslinging of the general election begins.
