Do people really do that? If so why. This is about getting what you see is the best or most electable candidate in, isn’t it?
But she doesn’t really have any momentum. There is almost no change in the state of the world between yesterday and today.
How do you see Rhode Island as a narrow win? The results I’m seeing on CNN show her at 98% of the votes counted winning 58/40. That’s not a squeaker by any definition.
Maeglin, I must disagree with you. Clinton now has a heapin’ helping of momentum in terms of the campaign narrative that the media will by and large be flooding us with.
We worked very hard here in Ohio for Obama - I did phonebanking and canvassing last week - but dammit, it wasn’t enough. I was surprised by how well she did here, frankly. Obama had the chance to put it away yesterday and, alas, fell short. A lot can happen between now and the convention, and I wouldn’t count out Clinton just yet, not by a long shot. I could, with equal plausibility, see either of them ending up as the nominee. I still think it ought to be Obama.
Yes, but perception is reality to some- all the main sites now have pictures of a beaming HRC amidst her adoring supporters, touting her big night.
My understanding is that the precincts have up to a week to report caucus results. They’ll probably be stuck on 36% for a while.
Hillary is threatening legal action over the Texas caucus.
Narrow win in the sense that she only picked up like 6 net delegates. Obama picked up 4 or so in Vermont so that’s a wash. You have to win by over 20 to get a sizable net delegate win.
Momentum is important, sure - but if it was everything then surely the 12 straight Obama victories before yesterday would have iced it for him. Why would anyone vote against that momentum?
The reality is that Obama will win WY and MS next week (probably by significant margins) and be right back where he was before yesterday, or perhaps with a bigger lead. Hillary needs a huge win in PA (bigger than she had in OH) to come close enough for FL and MI to make a difference, assuming she can even get them seated, which is unlikely. There just aren’t enough delegates left for her. Also, PA is so far away (April 27 or something), that there could be a significant amount of pressure on her to drop out, especially if the few intervening primaries go to Obama and the superdelegate count starts to swing.
I can’t help but wonder why she is floating the “joint ticket” balloon on this morning’s talk shows. Is she hoping people will vote for her assuming Obama will be her veep? Or would she really consider taking that spot herself?
But now she can say to the superdelegates, “Look, you need to rally behind me. This situation is exactly why we have superdelegates. I won in Texas. I won in Ohio, a perennial battleground state. We have proportional allocation of delegates, yes – but the electoral college does not. A win in the general election means that we get all 20 of Ohio’s electoral votes. And when you consider Florida’s situation, where I beat Senator Obama 50% to 33%, and the fact that we’re not counting pledged delegates at all – and you remember that Florida is another perennial battleground state with 27 electoral votes up for grabs, winner-take-all… then you can see that WHERE IT COUNTS IN A GENERAL ELECTION, I am a stronger candidate that Senator Barack Obama.”
I believe the super delegates will follow the people, that being said, people in Florida, California, New York, Texas, Ohio will band behind the nominee - that nominee does not have to be Clinton. It is abundantly clear that nominee doesn’t have to be Clinton. Though she will point it that way. Super delegates see the media blitz, but they are not jaded in my opinion - Obama is not out by a wide margin and will turn out to fight. That’s not blind optimism that’s reality. I’ve got no illusions this won’t be a blood bath - but I do think the superdelegates will band behind the nominee they think will win against McCain.
But that argument is pretty easy to shoot holes in, as it presumes that Obama can’t win in solidly blue states like New York and California, and that Clinton voters won’t support Obama in the general election. Neither is true, so it is a weak argument to make.
Momentum in the media and five cents won’t buy me a condom. Yesterday’s victory will be yesterday’s story. Aside from selling a few papers, I am not convinced that it will make much of a difference in either the short or the long term.
This is kind of interesting. Let’s parse this out state by state.
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Texas. Either democratic candidate will lose Texas to McCain. A victory here, especially as weak as HRC’s, is not very informative.
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Ohio. HRC won the rural districts, Obama won the urban ones. Both candidates will probably lose these districts to McCain anyway. A democratic victory in Ohio will be driven by the candidate’s get-out-the-vote activities in the urban and suburban areas to offset anticipated losses in the rural districts. Here, already, Obama clearly wins since he carried them all. Obama gets the educated, wealthier citizens out to vote, not Hillary. These will be needed to carry Ohio against McCain.
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Florida. The contest here was quite absurd. I have to wonder how anyone would believe that the Florida result could be indicative of an electoral outcome in November.
What counts in a general election is winning votes. The states she carried, perhaps with the exception of Ohio, will be carried by any democrat in a general election. This does not signal tremendous strength.
You’re shooting at the wrong target, Fear. I agree with Bricker, and actually came in here to say precisely what he said. The Dems are going to win CA and NY no matter which candidate they run. But Ohio is up for grabs, and Hillary won big over Obama there. Florida is in a similar situation, although we don’t know exactly how that would’ve played out if they had held an official primary.
Still, the idea that the superdelegates need to follow the will of the majority is rather an odd stance. Why on earth have them at all if all they are supposed to do is rubber stamp the popular vote? Their role is to pick the best candidate to run in Nov, and right now it’s not really clear who that is. I personally think Obama is the better candidate, but I can see some reasonable arguments that Hillary is. And Obama isn’t going to get the coddling by the press in the general that he has been getting in the primaries.
This is a very close race, folks, and the only conclusion I’m drawing right now is that the Dems need to revamp their nomination process. When you have stuff like people voting twice in TX (once in the primary, again in the caucus), what does it mean to “win” there?
The simple truth of the matter is you’re talking about pledged delegates. As long as Clinton can maintain a 100 delegate or so margin within that of Obama then the delegates who are actually going to decide this thing–the super delegates, may be able to justify voting for her over Obama. That’s almost certainly her game plan right now.
Hillary isn’t insane like Huckabee, she didn’t major in miracles. She has staff that know the math as intimately as any website you care to google if not more so. Her game plan right now is going to be focused on fighting desperately to maintain that 100 or so delegate margin and keep the perception up that she is doing well. She realizes that this is truthfully going to be decided by super delegates and that as long as she can continue to look “viable” she has a shot at swaying some super delegates. As a more entrenched and politically powerful politician it’s entirely possible Hillary likes her odds of swaying some super delegates her way.
It’s not likely, but also not impossible that in the first round no one wins the nomination. That means we get to see something we haven’t seen in a very, very long time. A second round of voting where none of the delegates are pledged anymore.
I’m not so sure that’s entirely true. Obama’s campaign has gone pretty negative. They’re both trying to misrepresent each other over NAFTA, and his campaign started pretty late with the vague suggestions of Hillary-supported voter fraud without actually coming out and accusing her of it. He constantly reminds us that she supported the war in Iraq (suggesting that she still supports it, in its current form) and his campaign loves reminding us of how many powerful people she has in her corner, strongly suggesting that she’s riding the coattails of men into power.
I think y’all are missing the math question that really matters in determining whether or not Clinton is “done”; viz., what sort of margin does Obama need in the remaining primaries to have enough committed delegates to guarantee a first-ballot nomination (or at least enough delegates that he needs only a handful of superdelegates to get over the top)? If he doesn’t get enough delegates to guarantee victory, it’s an open convention; and there the advantage would have to lie with Clinton, who doubtless has much more experience with arm-twisting than does Obama.
So: does Obama have a decent chance of putting this on ice, or not?
Al Gore for President!
I do not know that this is the right way to look at this. Many of the superdelegates are elected officials. I imagine their constituents are going to be paying very close attention to whom they pledge their votes. Some of these folks are going to have to think long and hard about how badly they want to keep their jobs after the convention. At the end of the day, I think this calculation will be more meaningful than any arm-twisting.
That can’t happen until the convention. If this thing isn’t settled before the convention, the dynamic will be pretty damned interesting at the convention, period.
As this thing continues forward with as narrow a margin as it has, MI and FL are going to be bigger and bigger wild cards. I can see the Dems having to do something to allow them to vote-- some sort of “do over” to make up for the blunder they made in disenfranchising those voters. Especially in FL. McCain is a viable candidate in that state (think of how many voters there consider McCain to be a youngster 
), and if I were an official of the Democratic party, I would not want to piss those voters off.