It’s not spinning. Obama was never ahead.
That word has been slung about in this election cycle so much it’s starting to lose meaning. Pennsylvania’s been ‘disenfranchised’ about as much as the blue states were in 2004, as much as I am every cycle because I live in Arizona, and as much as a Republican presumably is in Massachusetts. That’s spin, that 55% of Pennsylvanian Democratic voters are going to feel ‘disenfranchised’ because their candidate likely won’t win.
Edit: Yes, in a general election, 55% would normally be enough to carry the state, which is probably why Clinton feels the need to throw a celebration bash. It’s been known for rather a long time that this is a proportional system. Heck, that makes it even less likely that PA voters will feel disenfranchised: they’re responsible for Clinton picking up 10 more delegates. Those delegates just won’t matter set in the national context.
The New York Times takes Hillary to the woodshed for her campaign tactics:
The editorial also chides Obama for rising to her bait, but most of their rebuke is directed at Clinton.
Th editorial concludes with a warning:
I daresay one hound she should call off is the Big Dog.
IMHO, it’s just about time for the superdelegates to settle it. No later than the week after NC/IN, since everything after that is pretty trivial.
The Democratic Party got itself into this situation, by creating a system by which a nominee needs to win a 62.5% supermajority of the pledged delegates to win without the supers, i.e. any remotely close race would have to be decided by the superdelegates.
We have a somewhat close race - one with a clear leader who’s not going to win that 62.5% supermajority.
Your move, supers. This is what you signed on for.
Another editorial from Dick Morris; Too Little, Too Late
The spin is that this is any kind of significant victory for Hillary. She was leading by 20 points three weeks ago and Obama closed it to single digits. Her gain in pledged delegates will be negligible and Obama will win them back in NC anyway. She did not win by a large enough margin to persuade the supers to supercede the eventual popular vote, delegate count and states won, and she never had a chance to win the nom by any other metric, so regardless of what we’ll hear from Hillary and from the media, this is basically a win for Obama.
To use a football analogy, he held her to a field goal when she was behind by two touchdowns. Now he gets the ball in NC, and he’ll get that FG right back. When the media tries to spin it as still being a contest, think of them as Al Michaels and John Madden telling you “Don’t go anywhere folks, this game is far from over,” which is what announcers always say when it’s over.
Okay.
This site provides the following numbers from 2004:
Pennsylvania median household income $43,714, which compares well with the national average of $44,334 - especially when the average home is cheaper than it is nationally by more than $22,000. The poverty rate is lower than the national average as well.
So a lack of money across the board, as you seemed to imply, doesn’t seem to be the whole story.
Are there other factors in play? It seems so. This site links tables showing geographic mobility of the US population (2000 numbers). Nationally 60% of the country lives in the state where they were born. Here in Virginia where I now live it is around 52%. Pennsylvania is way at the top end of the rankings with a native-born percentage of 77.7%. Only Louisiana is higher.
Anyone studying Louisiana would assume right off that people stayed there for cultural as well as economic reasons. I think we have to assume that about Pennsylvania as well - the state is rather rich in subcultures. Certainly my folks wouldn’t be happy living anywhere else.
Interesting. But how does that explain the disproportionately older population? Are young folks less attached to the cultural aspects?
You have to distinguish in Pennsylvania (and other places) between those there who aren’t leaving for anything and those who are open to leaving. And in Pennsylvania, thirty years of economic dislocations have chased a good many of these people away already. These hit certain areas of the state disproportionately hard, and left a very elderly population by comparison behind. Pittsburgh for one embodies this.
This series of stories in the Post-Gazette is pretty comprehensive on the subject.
I’m honestly confused. That’s what I took RTF to be saying–the elderly were left behind when younger people got chased away. Where is your disagreement?
His statement was that young people got chased away but that old people can’t afford to move. Frankly, I think he has that somewhat backwards. Older workers tend to be established in their jobs and more rooted to their communities, and retirees have an income pool that they can spend anywhere. Many of them find no reason to leave a Pennsylvania they’ve always lived in, and where their friends, family, and churches are - even if they have money. They have houses and golf courses in PA too - they’re not limited to Florida and the Carolinas.
Younger people starting out tend to be the ones without money.
Like I said, 77.7 percent of the people living in PA were born there. Now a lot feeds this - not a lot of people move to PA, the people who left obviously are counted in other states, etc. But the fact that PA is so far on the top end of the scale here indicates a cultural tendency to stay.
Fellow PA dopers can back me up on this one.
Sorry, but just any old data won’t do. It has to be data that actually bears on the issue at hand.
We were talking about small towns in Pennsylvania. Averaging in people living on the Main Line doesn’t produce relevant numbers.
You should know that you are either reading the table wrong, or understanding it incorrectly.
You’re looking at (people born in the state who currently live there)/(people currently living in the state). What that really tells you about is in-migration, not out-migration. The larger the percentage born in the state, the smaller the proportion of people who have moved in.
What you’d need is (people born in the state who currently live there)/(people born in the state). That would tell you how many people leave. (ETA: or, rather, don’t leave. The ones that leave are the complement, of course.)
If Pennsylvania is near the top of the heap in that ratio, that would back up your assertion, at least for Pennsylvania as a whole. (Since, once again, we’re talking about small towns in Pennsylvania.)
Then she goes in to attempt to break the quarterbacks arm in the final minute, so that the opposing team will lose the championship game next week, and she’ll be better positioned for next year’s season…
(cynical? Me? No, why do you ask?)
JFTR, Pennsylvania’s 17th out of 50 states and D.C. in this ratio, behind such culturally distinctive states as California and Arizona.
Oops, 18th. Missed a state.