Um, no offense, but the idea that the Democrat higher-ups are suddenly going to jump onto the Obama band-wagon is pie-in-the-sky. This thing is going the distance: the party mucky-mucks prefer Clinton.
We’ll see. But I beg your pardon, because I don’t think the muckety-mucks prefer Clinton in sufficient numers. Unless you have a cite.
Will they continue to prefer her if they see her as wrecking the party’s chances with her tactics?
FORTY DAYS!!??!! That’s just like Lent! Okay, what is everybody going to be giving up? I think for me it’s gonna be wild honey and locusts…
Which should make this year interesting for them, unlike most election years. There are a couple of Dopers in Puerto Rico, aren’t there?
Quick aside: folks from Indiana are called Hoosiers.
I think Obama’s best move is to play the delegate numbers game: find districts with an odd number of delegates and get a ground operation there to squeak out a win; play a blowout game in friendly even-count districts and hope to win 3-1, 4-2, or 5-3 for a net gain in delegates. A few small six-delegate districts inside Philly or Pittsburgh that break 4-2 can wipe out the delegate wins for miles and miles of farmland and mountains.
Note also that Clinton didn’t even file a full slate of delegates in PA. It’s a technicality, but I think it could be spun – late in the game – as “she’s said a lot about how much she cares about Pennsylvania, but she couldn’t be bothered to submit a complete candidacy package.”
I don’t think Obama can win Pennsylvania on his merits and charm, mostly because of its demographics. However, Hillary’s campaign seems to work through some kind of spooky-action-at-a-distance: her surrogate attacks appear unconnected to any kind of central strategy or core message (perhaps to enhance deniability) but this also makes a good number of the attacks backfire spectacularly. Are they really Hillary’s attacks, or are her surrogates that far off the reservation, and don’t realize the damage they’re doing to her?
I can’t tell who’s in charge of the campaign, and perhaps that’s the reason she’s losing. An executive ought to at least be able to run a campaign, right?
She hasn’t been running her campaign, she’s been flying on her name and not her actions. If she had substance behind her actions she’d be in the lead right now. So what if she’s tenacious, so what if she can play hardball - Obama is just as calculating as she is and you can’t tell me all of Obama’s advisors are sitting down and planning the end game which will quickly turn into the national election.
Sex with supermodels. Definitely.
-Joe
I’ll be rehearsing the choir of voices crying in the wilderness.
Ready for it to be over. I read an article in the Charlotte Observer which suggested that state and local politicians are dreading the primary. For one thing, airtime gets a lot more expensive when you have presidential candidates who want to buy ads.
I think that Clinton may squeak by in Pennsylvania, but she’ll lose in North Carolina. While Pennsylvania has lots of working-class white Democrats, North Carolina doesn’t. I suspect that Clinton’s tactics to appeal to working-class whites in Pennsylvania won’t go over so well with Democrats in North Carolina, who tend to be well-educated whites or African Americans.
Mathmatically, Clinton will need a couple miracles to win. Even if she does better than expected in the remaining contests, Hillary would only be able to put a dent in Obama’s approx 150 pledged delegate lead, maybe work it down to 100. When Obama wins the pledged delegates and popular vote, there is no way that the super delegates will swing to Clinton by more than +50. In my opinion, they’ll swing toward Obama.
According to the DCW (Democratic Convention Watch: Ultimate Delegate Tracker), Clinton would be +111 if Michigan’s and Florida’s delegates were seated. I don’t know the exact breakdown, but most of those must come from Michigan, which will never be seated without a do-over. If both states have a revote, i see Clinton coming out of it with fewer than +50.
So Hillary is toast unless Obama’s been ordering from the Emperor’s Club.
A few weeks ago, i heard a pundit or news source mention that Puerto Rico could choose to apportion their delegates all-or-nothing if they wished. Can anyone confirm or deny this? Puerto Rico has 55 delegates and it would be a major swing if it were 55-0.
Who is going to win Puerto Rico? Non-continental U.S. contests favor Obama, but hispanics favor Clinton.
Yes, I can deny it. DNC rules forbid winner-take-all contests. Puerto Rico will hold a primary on June 1 (recently changed from a caucus), and the delegates will be allocated proportionally as in every other Democratic primary.
Interesting. The justification I heard (a couple months back) was that voters in Puerto Rico tended to hash out their arguments and then vote in unity for one candidate. I’m in no position to evaluate the truth or falsity of that, but it wouldn’t be against the DNC rules to do so. However, going from a caucus to a primary certainly does change the plausibility of it working that way.
This isn’t the source i first heard it, but i googled it, and this source says something similar to what i heard.
Michael Barone, U.S. News
http://www.usnews.com/blogs/barone/2008/2/6/puerto-rican-poll-power.html
This article implies that the Democrat leader in Puerto Rico decides who gets all the delegates.
However, from the Washington Post fact checker:
That must be why Clinton’s superdelegate lead has been dropping like a rock for the past couple of months.
And certainly if there were still a bunch of superdelegates that had been waiting for an excuse to get off the fence and endorse Clinton, her wins in the Texas and Ohio primaries provided plenty of cover for doing that. And certainly Clinton would welcome a superdelegate surge right about now to get some positive buzz.
:crickets:
I think I’ll give up $5,000/hour hookers.
Forget that. Obama should spend the next month in Guam. He could hold his press junkets on the beach with mixed drinks for everyone.
Actually, I have a cite here that says exactly the opposite.
I posted my concerns about Puerto Rico a month ago, with a link to the same US News article Monocracy provided above. I’m relieved to hear that there’s pretty much no chance it will go winner-take-all, though it would be nice to have a cite to a firm rule disallowing it, since it’s apparently happened before.
Certainly. See the Democratic National Committee Delegate Selection Rules, Rule 13, “Fair Reflection of Presidential Preference”.
This rule has been in place since 1984. If one candidate won all of the seats in a particular primary or caucus in any election since then, it was because no other candidate got over the 15% threshold (not uncommon after only one candidate is left standing!), not because the rules were different.