I see this meme a lot, and it bugs me with its blind silliness. Obama suports seem to think their canididate has a giod-given right to it, and thet Hillary somehow can’t win or ought to drop out just because.
You can argue that Obama would be a stronger candidate (I doubt it), but neither one of them can win enough pledged delgates now. It’s going to be the superdelegates who decide it, and unfortunately for you, a tiny lead mostly from states which are unlikely to swing Dem are not going to be a big factor in their plans, I think. Frankly, the Superdelegates aren’t likely to care that Obama’s early lead gives him a technical advantage. A much bigger reason in their eyes would probably be the cash question, but even there I doubt Hillary will ever really run on empty.
Anyway, I keep seeing some sort of wishful thinking in the eyes of Obvama supporters that ANY MINUTE NOW everyone will just drop Hillary and go totally Obama. Uh, no, ain’t gonna happen. This one will amost certainly go down to the wire.
It’s all in the math. Right now according to Real Clear Politics, Obama has 1721 delegates and Hillary has 1590. There are about 400+ pledeged delegates left and it would be charitable to Hillary to assume a 50/50 split. That gives Obama about 1920 or so delegates. This leaves Obama about 104 short of nomination, and there are about 300 uncommitted supers left. Hillary would need over 2/3 of the remaining superdelegates to vote contrary to the expressed will of the people to steal this nomination. Unless they get a metric that shows her ahead and that people can believe in, she has no chance.
Or the supers can adopt the logic of discounting the caucus numbers, because they were bizarrely confusing and don’t accurately capture the will of the voters. That would put Hillary about 40 delegates in the lead, and they could then select her without being contrary to the will of the voters.
“Obama’s early lead” You do remember that Hillary was the odd-on favorite and had the early lead. Obama took it from her and is still leading. Only thing savong Hillary is the decency of Obama not to state the obvious truth. When Bill went out on the campaign train Obama could have said: “He lied to the court. he lied to the public, and more importantly he lied to his wife. Now she has him out spreading lies about me. We need a new kind of leadership in Washinton”.
Or, “Hillary has experience with 3AM calls; but usually they’re from Bill’s girlfriends drunk dialing with their STD test results.”
If I were a superdelegate who didn’t have political considerations to worry about, I’d look at a state-by-state analysis of who could do the best against McCain and pick that person. Not national polls, not who won which state, but how things look like in November against McCain. I realize there is a certain amount of guess work that goes into that analysis, but that’s what it takes. The will of the people be damned-- the party is supposed to pick its best candidate, and reasonable people can disagree about who that is.
And I say this as someone who really doesn’t like Hillary and who wants Obama to win.
I’m not sure that’s a fair motive to impute on Bricker. He’s just offering an alternate method of calculation that would cast Clinton in a favorable light (one that isn’t ‘count MI and FL!’). To go from that to “intensely interested” seems to be jumping the gun a bit.
ETA: Not to mention he’s arguing against the use of caucuses in another thread, so his position here would be consistent. It could be that he doesn’t like them because they favor Obama, but I’m willing to give him the benefit of the doubt that he just doesn’t like them on principle.
You cannot really have a “lead” in superdelegates in any way that matters until the convention takes place, since they can change their mind on a whim, and will do so depending on any number of things. Pledged delegates are a pretty sure thing; supers can break either way, based on who promises the most pork and favours, who looks like a better bet to win in November, or how they feel that morning.
True enough, but I imagine most of the superdelegates are wise enough not to openly commit to anything until they’re willing to stick to it; changing their announced votes before a clear winner emerges would probably not reflect well on them. At least, I presume that’s the reason there’s still so many undeclared superdelegates.
This is my view on the matter. It ain’t over until the fat lady sings, and I think there will be a lot of back and forth until the convention.
Since some poeple noted it: Hillary was the front runner before the race began. Obama started winning a lot of the early primaries, hence his lead now.
How would she be stealing the nomination by winning it according to the rules?
You act like superdelegates voting against what the people voted for to be astonishing. That is why they are superdelegates: they can vote how they want. If they want to vote for Paris Hilton as President, don’t blame Hillary or the superdelegates themselves. Blame the DNC for setting up a system which gives party bigwigs a free vote regardless of the will of the people…
Some of the supers themselves see their job as to ratify rather than decide. It would be in the rules for Hillary to recruit enough of them to win. But to the majority of Democrats in the US that wanted Obama to win and having won the most contests and the most delegates by the rules that were in place, for the supers to go against this will would be in the view of many (such as myself) be a stolen nomination.
Yea, the reason for the difference appears to be more or less what you’d expect as well. Obama does better in the blue states, but Hillary still wins most of them, albeit by a smaller margin. But she also picks up the big “purple” states, and they easily make up for her losses in the smaller states. I think the super-delegates will need to at least consider that. Pissing off a few liberal voters in CT is more then worth making a few moderates happy in OH.
Of course, polls this far out should be taken with a big handful of salt, especially since no one is campaigning against McCain yet. Still its worth looking at if for no other reason then to demonstrate how important OH and FL will be.
There are several polls that show her losing by up to 7% in Florida, and a few that have her winning by less than the typical margin of error in. I don’t know what methodology they used to give Hillary Florida vs. McCain was there, but it’s suspicious to say the least. Once you take the more reasonable approach of denying Hillary Florida, you can see that she isn’t even ahead of McCain.
The most interesting poll there is “SurveyUSA” which also gives Hillary Arkansas by eleven points. The SurveyUSA poll is the only one there which gives her a respectable lead in Florida.
Edit: Also of interest in comparing those stats is that Obama has only 2 “barely” states going for him, Michigan and Colorado, while Hillary has SEVEN “barely” states going for her. There is only ONE “barely” republican state she can hope to make up the difference in, while there are SIX “barely” republican states Obama can win.
I made the argument in another thread that Hilary in fact has a compelling argument that she should be the nominee based on the voters she’s favored with. Furthermore the Superdelegates who haven’t declared convince me that it’s something they’re seriously looking at as well. I say this as a recent Obama supporter and someone who’s always thought Hillary would be a terrible nominee because of the baggage she brings to the table.