The media are saying Hillary Clinton “won” the Democratic primary in New Hampshire. But she “won” 11 delegates, while Barack Obama won 12 delegates. Isn’t the point of the primary to elect delegates to the national convention?
According to CNN, Clinton and Obama both won 9 delegates; Edwards with 4.
I think “won” in the sense most people are using it means “won the popular vote.” In this case, Hillary won by about 8,000 votes.
Well, they both only won 9 a piece today. But New Hampshire has 27 delegates, 22 of which were up for grabs today. I’m not exactly sure where the other 5 come from, and my Googling has been a bit weak, but, yeah, Obama has more delegates overall from NH than Hillary, as far as I see.
Hillary already had 2 additional superdelegates in the bag while Obama had three.
The crux of the matter is, that the delegates from these little states don’t end up meaning very much in themselves–they’ll be completely swamped by the delegates from the Super Tuesday primaries. But there’s no reason to think that the voters in those states will be, overall, that much different from voters in Iowa and New Hampshire. Treating these voters as a sample, one can extrapolate to big victories in the larger states for these early leaders.
It’s a self-fulfilling prophecy, in a way. In theory, Obama’s and Clinton’s popular victories in these first two states will be meaningless if, say, Kucinich sweeps Super Tuesday. But that really can’t happen-the press attention to the leaders in these early contests is a virtually insurmountable hurdle for him. A very strong candidate might be able to–but a very strong candidate would have been at least more competitive at this early stage.
On the flip side, the McCain campaign, which was virtually broke and had been practically written off of any chance for the Republican nomination, has been given a new lease on life by his New Hampshire win. He lacks money for advertising–but the media coverage he earned yesterday is effectively free advertising for him, at least for a while. It gets voters thinking about him who may not have been. In contrast, a lot of Democratic voters who might have at least been considering Kucinich are probably now worried about wasting their votes if they go that way …