Hawaii is easy. I doubt HRC will even get past the 15% mark there.
Wisconsin …
I suspect that Obama will win there and win well, despite the fact that he has not consistently polled well there to date … it’s an open primary and independents care a lot more about voting for Obama than they care about voting for McCain. The momentum factor will also play into it. And his ground game … he’s there tonight, HRC is in Texas.
What do different results there signify? I think either of them can stand a close loss there. A blow-out by HRC would take a lot of wind out of Obama’s sails in the build-up to March 4th. Maybe not insurmountable but it would make his almost inevitability at this point a bit less … inevitable. A blow-out by Obama puts HRC on a death watch with the only question being if any one would even bother calling a code. She’d need to have a monster blow-out of both Texas and Ohio to come even to him. By then the powers that be will have coalesced around him … rats and a sinking ship and all.
It hardly matters. All eyes are on Texas, Ohio, and Pennsylvania a little further off. There’s folks willing to call the nomination for Obama if he manages to win *any *of those.
A win for Clinton, especially a blowout, would help her a bit come March 4, but not by a huge amount. Obama would still have HI and the rest of February coming down solidly for him. That said, I think Obama will pull this off. Clinton knows she’s on life support so Obama may be able to spend more time and money there while Clinton must turtle in the March 4 states.
Like I said before, he’s going to do what he does best…full throttle into the next 3 weeks. No misses, just slamming the pavement. To be honest, if I weren’t so busy at work, I’d fly to hear him speak again. He’s electrifying.
He’ll do the best he can shaking peoples hands, talking from the gut, and he won’t slam anyone…unless they push hard enough first. HRC was griping about that last night, saying no one is slamming him yet. My wag, slam away, he’s still going to be our next president.
Not sure I get that. They’re within a handful of delegates of each other. How does that put Clinton on her death bed (I assume that’s what you mean by “life support”)? Even if we go to a brokered convention I still would not say that either of them were in need of life support.
She’s lost eight primaries and caucuses in the last four days, and doesn’t expect to win another for three more weeks. She’s fired her top two campaign managers, and tonight in Virginia, Obama made some serious inroads into her base of support in lower-income voters, women and older people.
Yes, it’s worse for Huckabee. He can’t win. But Clinton is in a lot of trouble.
Big thing right now that Hillary lacks is momentum. The last few primaries haven’t even been close, and the wider the margin of victory, the more the democratic higher ups (your super delegates) have to take notice. Now Hillary seems to be in the position of having to focus on staying in the race instead of winning it. She pretty much has to not only win but dominate in Texas and Ohio to win, and winning those two states by close margins simply keeps her campaign afloat.
QFT. The average margin of victory in the last seven contests (assuming I didn’t miss one) is 31%, and 28% if DC is taken out. He’s pretty much bitchslapping her now. In Virginia he beat her in virtually every demographic CNN measures: more women, more men, more church attenders, and perhaps most importantly, more than two thirds of the people who had never voted before voted for Obama tonight.
Interestingly enough, 17% of the people who though Clinton would be a better commander-in-chief voted for Obama, versus 1% for the other way around.
I find it very interesting that CNN has now, suddenly, started reported delegate counts in both pledged and superdelegate totals (previously they only reported the totals). What does that mean do you think?
It means they are changing gears from the inevitablity of Agent Clinton to the YES, WE CAN MAN Barack. Media sources all morning have been reporting positive swings for Obama and negatives for Clinton. And we all know what it means when the media starts putting positive spins on a candidate…the ripple effect will be shown by the end of the day I’d guess. His polling numbers will start to turn around in the up coming larger state primaries. A couple of close wins by Clinton won’t luff Obama’s sails too much.
Cynically speaking, it means that they can no longer claim Clinton is the front-runner even using their estimates of superdelegates (which seems to be larger than any other media outlet’s). By breaking it out, they shift from “Obama is leading” to “Obama leads in pledged delegates and Clinton still leads in superdelegates.”
Maybe I’m wrong but CNN has seemed the most reluctant of the major media outlets to acknowledge Obama’s progress thus far.
I don’t know. CNN is usually right there with a great picture of Obama from a victory rally every time he’s pulled out a win in these last few primaries/caucouses.
I think they’ve somehow conflated “most accurate” with “includes the most superdelegates”
She’s pretty much rolled over there and is focusing all her energy on a last stand at the Alamo. Independents will mass over to vote for him and ignore McCain.
The other states of the day will go by similar margins except Hawaii which he’ll win by perhaps 3 to 1 or more.
She will ignore the results (the elections there never happened) and her proxies will spin it as his expected victories but that Ohio and Texas are what is important. Then he’ll win there too (at least one of the two and the other close). End of race.
Which shows the sheer genius of the Clinton campaign. I mean, can you imagine a sports team saying, “oh well, we weren’t suppose to win those last 10 games anyway, but wait until the playoffs!”
Amazing that someone can simply say, “it is not a big deal - I wasn’t expected to win there…” with a straight face.
I can see a candidate making that claim maybe once - in the opposing candidates home state for instance - but to simply write off multiple states with a flippant, “doesn’t really matter” comment is pretty amazing, yet everybody seems to be buying into that argument. Talk about good spin…
Hillary has a new ad hitting Obama for not agreeing to debate her in Wisconsin as “he’d rather give speeches than have to answer questions”.
This is one of those "If I can sit on my corpulent bum in Alabama, having never run for office, not being psychic, never having studied campaigning in depth, and yet I can tell you that this ad makes her look petty and bad, not Obama, and will backfire… then why can’t she and her keepers? (Obama’s response, if he feels the need to make one, should be that he has debated her several times on CNN, will be debating her again soon enough, and that by the way Hillary evidently prefers debating and making negative ads and mudslinging to actually building herself up, and prefers any chance to get on television like it was uncut soma, and that oh yeah, he has a state to represent).
One negative thing about the ad for Hillary is the “Damn! If the worst thing you can sling at an opponent is He doesn’t want to go to Wisconsin in February, then you’ve got a freaking Boy Scout on your hands” subliminal factor.
This morning on a national news network [GMA] the nagative ad was shown, then the camera cut to an Auto Worker who just heard Obama’s “substantive” speech in Janesville, WI and he said, "I don’t know why she feels like she can run negative ads here in WI, when she is standing in some other state, while he is standing right here in front of me in Janesville." Nuff Said. People aren’t stupid.
It already is. People aren’t dumb, and dems are seeing that the more she negatively capaigns in the primary the more divide she is creating in the party. The more divide she creates in the party the higher the likelihood of it negatively effecting the party in the national race. Just further congeals my opinion in her that she is nothing more than a power hungry wench.
Further, she should have a Jolly Roger flying over her campaign headquarters, because that’s what she’s acting like, a Pirate!
