He was never going to close the deal. Nobody actually thought he would. Not on our side, not on their side, not on the Republican’s side, not anyone. It’s fucking Pennsylvania! Much as I hate to admit it, Fast Eddie was right…there are a LOT of people in this state who will never vote for a black man. Period.
A win is a win, and she won. Who cares what the expectations were a few weeks ago? She doesn’t even have to spin this. She won. That’s enough to give her breathing room to continue. Hillary now doesn’t have a chance in Hell of winning the nomination unless the remaining Supers go to her and the Obama committeds switch, which is not going to happen, but I think she will continue to fight, and try to destroy Obama’s chances in any way she can in the process.
Let the arm-twisting begin!
…and I said as much in the other thread.
I wager Obama will still have no problem winning PA in the general election. I didn’t realize that on top of Mayor Nutter and Gov Rendell, Hillary also had Murtha and Sestak supporting her as well; that had to be a huge boost. As long as they support Obama in the general, he should have no problems up there.
Context, Doors, context. If anyone involved in these threads doesn’t yet get the simple math involved they might as well refrain from posting.
Thus my point was largely in the abstract
– that this Primary would end tonight. Hope against hope sort of thing. Because whatever anyone might say this intra-party race has turned extremely nasty. And it is only going to hurt the ‘winner.’
Too much of the Republican campaign has already been run for them. Should this not end after NC and Indiana, there won’t be much left of either candidate to stand-up to The Sleaze Machine.
Eight more years of McSame. Good luck with that should you (in the collective) last that long.
I’ve got a different foil hat on. Unlike Dio’s, the antennas on mine point towards the ingrained racism in most of the 60 and over crowd. No suprise really, I can think of a few within my family that fit right-in with those demographics.
:::sigh:::
It’s not just young people leaving, but can also be old people moving in. Economically depressed areas can be good places to retire to. Cheap housing, cheap labor, etc. make that pension check stretch much farther. The lack of jobs can be a plus when you don’t NEED a job.
If this were a winner take all system, yes. In a proportional system, getting the plurality of the vote only means she got a plurality. Depending on how many PA delegates there are and how they’re allocated, it may well be a tie in delegates gained.
Could be, but I’m doubtful. With 87% of the votes counted it’s Clinton/Obama 55/45. A 10% win for Clinton makes a tie in delegates difficult.
I’m wondering if this isn’t going to be a problem for Democrats in the general election - If I were a democratic voter in PA, and I took the time to vote, and my candidate won the day by 10 points, and yet my own party yelled at me to shut up and go away because they don’t like my candidate, well… I might feel a little disenfranchised.
For all the noise Democrats have been making about election ethics in the last 8 years, this primary season has been a disaster for them. The debacle with the first two states losing their right to vote, then the other spectacle of the chosen candidate winning the caucuses while the the other one wins big open primaries, then the heavy pressure from the party to force a candidate out of the race while she’s still within spitting distance of the popular vote and still winning states…
The problem for Obama now is that even if he wins the nomination, it’s going to have an asterisk beside it. And an awful lot of voters in those big midwestern states are possibly going to feel like they’ve been railroaded by the ‘elites’ on the coasts. This whole process may have created a whole lot of new ‘McCain Democrats’. But we’ll see.
The best thing for Obama tonight would have been to win PA outright, or to lose close enough that you could say he had roughly equivalent support. He may be able to swing the delegates now and lock up the nomination, but it’s not going to look very democratic.
Well I called it Hillary by about 10 and so it seems to be. Given that those still most still not reported in include some going solidly for Obama (eg fairly populus Chester, only 21% in and going 54/46 Obama so far and so on) I am still hoping that the morning will show on my hope for single digit side of that “about” that I had hoped for. (Albeit I had dreamed about more.)
So a day or two of Hillary crowing but no major move catching up in either delegate or popular vote counts. She failed to get the blow-out that she really needs to achieve either of those. Her potential to get to either of those is now even farther away. Remember that those optimistic scenarios included her winning seven of nine by 20 - 40% margins all and that only got her the popular vote counting Florida. And still far far behind in the pledged delegate count. Her campaign is from here a complete farce.
Hillary’s funding is still withering away. She’ll hang in to the next round on the strength of this. No farther. It ends after IN and NC.
Listen to the tone of each of the candidates’ speeches- one speaks of Me the other of We.
“Yes We Can” vs. “Yes She Can”
‘Well gee Hillary, I’d love to be a part of helping to make my country too, but if you insist. You dont need to shove so hard though. Oh and one more thing, please just dont forget about us…’
Ugh. Make the mean lady stop.
You mean the elites on the coasts in, say, Massachussetts, New York, and California? Or are you talking about the coastal elites in Alaska, Maine, Washington, South Carolina, and Louisiana?
Hmm?
Geebus, I’m as much as an Obama supporter as the nest Doper, but let’s just take a deep breath: Clinton won Pennsylvania. All this “expectations” talk is seriously just Washington type-BS. Clinton won by a decent margin, and Obama’s still got the inside track to the nomination. Let’s not allow spin to obviate reality.
Slight problem here. Every Clinton rally I’ve heard, including the one tonight, the refrain is “Yes We Will.”
Due to the number of delegates per district and the splits required to gain a majority per district, it’s unlikely that Clinton would see a major win in delegates as well.
This fellow goes through it district by district with his (now outdated) predictions. Although an older column now that we know the results, his statements regarding the splits still stand. He concludes with:
She got more votes, but 10% in a state that was going for her by 20+% three weeks ago is not exactly helpful.
Okay, time for bed for me. I predicted a 12% win for Clinton. She got 10%, which was worse than my prediction. Why do I still feel like crap?
Good night everyone.
You really don’t understand people very much, do you?
My parents are in their sixties - and my dad has fairly portable skills. In fact he works right now in Kentucky - they brought him in to unfuck some problems at a steel mill. This is just a temp job for him, though, and he’s already planning his move back to Clairton, Pa.
Clairton.
Most people haven’t heard of Clairton at all, and the ones who have remember it as the setting of The Deer Hunter. Since that film the town lost most of its population and business base - it became even more depressing. Crime skyrocketed, the schools there have been in rather terminal decline since around 1968.
My folks moved back there in 1992. Mom is a native, Dad grew up nearby. I lived there until I was four, and then my folks moved to Washington County so my brothers and I could attend decent schools. Once we all graduated, my parents promptly moved back to Clairton. They sure were swimming against the tide by doing so.
My mom can see the house she grew up in from her dining room window. One block over live two of her sisters and their families. Next door to them lived my grandfather until he died three years ago - his widow still lives there.
So my folks, who really could live anywhere in the country, choose to live in a decaying mill town on the Monongahela River - and to them this was the only logical choice. Never mind that the Clairton my mom grew up in is long gone, it is still her town, and my dad’s. They will be buried there.
I do not know for certain who my folks voted for (I’m guessing they’ll split again - my mom is more conservative than my dad is.) I don’t think Obama is on their short list.
As has been pointed out, your whole “elites on the coasts” line doesn’t make a scrap of sense. But you also overlook a number of other realities.
Let’s look at this phrase “big open primaries.” The big states (100+ delegates) are California, Georgia, Illinois, Massachusetts, New York, North Carolina, Texas, Virginia, New Jersey, Ohio and Pennsylvania. Some of those aren’t open primaries, but I’ll assume that by “open” you meant something other than open in the political sense. So the count (assuming NC goes Obama and giving Hillary TX) is 7-4.
Compare 7-4 to Obama’s 13-1 run in the caucuses. While Hillary has won slightly over half of the big primaries, Obama has won almost every caucus.
Also, while you assert that there has been heavy pressure from the party for Hillary to leave, there is no evidence of this. What pressure are you talking about? And even if you do somehow interpret something as pressure, what are you talking about “within spitting distance of the popular vote?” Even allowing for the fact that comparing caucuses and primaries is like apples and oranges, she’s not even close to “within spitting distance.”
In short, your narrative doesn’t fit the facts. And what does any of it have to do with “election ethics?”
Don’t give Clinton Texas. She didn’t win it. Obama got more delegates, and he got more net votes from the caucus than she did from the primary (not that that really means anything).