-
sponsorship
Watching the Obama speech right now ...
Speaking of people standing behind the candidates, has anyone else noticed the three guys behind Obama wearing Abercrombie & Fitch? What is this, product placement? A last-minute appeal to white voters?
A Trailhead analysis of individual donation patterns suggests that Obama could be subtly courting the Abercrombie vote. Since January 2007, employees of Abercrombie & Fitch gave $950 to Clinton, according to the FEC disclosure database. During the same period, Obama received only $500 from Abercrombie employees. (Keep in mind this only includes donations above $200.)
Whether or not this move will be enough to raise Obama's support among wearers of Abercrombie & Fitch clothing is unclear.
With analysis by Chris Wilson.
-
sponsorship
We've written at length about Clinton's attachment to Rocky and her flawed belief that Balboa's plight mirrors her own. (Her devotion to the comparison has also inspired one of the greater YouTube political mashups of all time.) Tonight, Clinton has taken the metaphor to the next level. During her victory speech, two garishly red boxing gloves are floating behind her right shoulder, attached to somebody wearing a purple V-neck.
We know that campaigns orchestrate their human backdrops carefully, so it seems clear the Clinton campaign put the gloves behind Clinton on purpose. But the real question is whether they gave the gloves to the V-neck wearer or he brought them in by himself.
-
sponsorship
With nearly half of precincts reporting, Trailhead is prepared to cautiously call the Republican primary for John McCain, who currently leads the state with 72 percent of the vote against one man who dropped out 49 days ago and another who rarely tops 6 percent in national polls.
Former candidate Mike Huckabee, who still appeared on the ballot even though he dropped out after McCain clinched a majority of delegates after the March 4 primaries, is pulling down 12 percent of the vote, while libertarian-minded candidate Ron Paul is drawing about 16 percent. For a few sweet moments, it appeared that Armstrong County would come through for Paul, whose small but ardent base has made him a significant presence on the Internet, if not in the polls. But that light-pink blip on CNN’s county-by-county map quickly evaporated as more results registered.
Candidates like McCain with no mathematical chance of losing the election are naturally less likely to draw hordes of supporters to the ballot booth, while Paul’s supporters are a determined bunch who seem indefatigable. The one in eight people who still showed up to vote for Huckabee are more puzzling and perhaps do not bode well for McCain’s odds in Pennsylvania in the general election. Then again, Pennsylvania, while not overwhelmingly blue, hasn’t elected a Republican since George H.W. Bush in 1988.
-
sponsorship
Yesterday Politico’s
Roger Simon wondered
how much of the vote Obama would lose by virtue of his race alone. Simon cites
an AP poll in which eight percent of voters said they would not vote for a
black man, but guesses that figure is low—it’s really the number of people who admit they’re racist. He ballparks the number at around 15 percent.
Tonight's exit polls provide a lens, however blurry, through which to view the racist vote. CNN asked voters whether the race of the candidates was important to
them. Twenty percent of voters said “yes,” and of that group 59 percent broke
for Clinton.
Meanwhile, voters who said “no” split between Clinton and Obama 50-50. So if
you set aside the group that considers race important, the candidates tie.
To zoom in a little, CNN also breaks down the voters by race. Of the whites who said that race is important
to them, 75 percent broke for Clinton.
Keep in mind this group is pretty small—only 13 percent of voters overall. But think
about it: If you’re white, you tell pollsters that race helped determine who you voted for, and you
vote for the white candidate, it’s not a particularly huge stretch to conclude that you’re a
racist. (The corollary, of course--and this is where the argument gets messy--is that black voters who said they voted for Obama because of race are also racist. CNN doesn't have numbers on this.)
For a while now, more Clinton
voters have said they would not vote for Barack Obama in the general than Obama
voters said they would not vote for Clinton.
(Last month, a national poll showed that
one in four Clinton
voters would vote for McCain if Obama won, whereas one in five Obama voters would do the same if Clinton won.) It’s impossible to quantify exactly
how much of that disparity you can chalk up to racism—especially given that
many of the people Obama may have alienated in non-racial ways (the “bitter”
comment, for example) happen to be white. But I wouldn’t be surprised if it
contributes.
-
sponsorship
We've got one hand on the remote and one on our Delegate Calculator as we try to suss out what different margins of victory mean for the two candidates. One thing, though, is certain: Hillary Clinton has already won 28 pledged delegates in Pennsylvania. The state has 158 pledged delegates in total, and it awards 55 proportionally by the statewide total and 103 proportionally by district. Since Clinton is projected to win the state's overall vote, she is guaranteed at least one more of those statewide-allocated delegates than Obama. Half of 55 is 27.5. Hence, the 28-delegate guarantee. Now we've got 130 left to divvy up.
-
sponsorship
Surprise! Fox News and NBC and CNN are calling it for Clinton.
As we and everyone else with an Internet connection has been saying for weeks now, it just matters by how much. Earlier today, Chad Matlin gamed out the various victory margins and what they mean for Clinton. We also wrote up a to-do list for Obama to wrap this thing up.
Both camps have their respective spins: Clinton can win big states! But look how far Obama has come! But look how poorly he does among whites! But look how newly registered voters broke for Obama! (On that last one, 60 percent of voters who registered in January voted for Barack.)
But as you digest the primary night analysis, keep in mind what you might call the market fundamentals of this race:
Obama is still leading in the pledged delegate count, and Clinton isn't going to catch up. Clinton is leading among superdelegates by about 22, but her lead has been narrowing. Clinton is running out of money. Party elders are getting impatient. There are only nine contests left.
-
sponsorship
When it comes to exit polls, I’ve taken it as a given that change and experience are just euphemisms for Obama and Clinton. If someone says they want change, chances are they’re an Obama voter; same with experience and Clinton voters.
But these exits show just how thoroughly change has infected the race, to the point that Obama no longer owns the term. (If he ever did.) Fifty-one percent of voters named it as the top quality they’re looking for in a candidate, according to CNN—more than any other quality. (Keith Olbermann says 73 percent of voters say they want to bring change.) Of those, 70 percent voted for Obama. Then take a look at the 26 percent of voters who say they value experience above everything. Ninety-three percent of them voted for Clinton. So while experience is still a signifier for Clinton, change is more ambiguous.
Also: Note that only 8 percent of voters named “electability” as the most important quality. Given that Clinton’s case for the nomination rests largely on electability—how else to convince superdelegates to reject the pledged delegate count?—this isn’t particularly encouraging. Then again, who would say “electability” when asked that question? Does anyone really see themselves as that calculating?
-
sponsorship
The exit polls have arrived! All of the highlights below use CNN's numbers, which may change as the night goes on and they iron out their projections.
- The demographics heavily favor Clinton. Fifty-eight percent of voters were women; 38 percent were 60 years old or older. Clinton won 55 percent of women, 59 percent of 60-plus.
- Clinton seems to have won the ad wars. Among the 43 percent of voters who said ads weren't important, Clinton beats Obama, as she does among those who did say the ads mattered.
- More people think Clinton can fix the economy than think Obama can repair it. More than half the voters say the economy is the No. 1 issue.
- Forty-three percent of voters say Clinton isn't trustworthy. Twenty-one percent of those voters supported Clinton anyway.
- Outside Philadelphia, Obama did best in central and northern Pennsylvania while Clinton cleaned house in the Pittsburgh area, winning by 23 percent.
- Clinton won the white vote by 20 points while Obama won the African-American vote by 84 points. Whites made up 80 percent of the pool; black voters comprised 14 percent of the overall vote. Among white voters in Ohio, Obama's deficit was 30 points.
- Twenty percent of voters say race was important in their vote. Fifty-nine percent of them voted for Clinton. There was an even, 50-50 split among those who said race was not important.
UPDATE 8:38 p.m.: We've tweaked the numbers since the initial post because CNN changed theirs.
-
sponsorship
During the past six weeks, Barack Obama has thrown everything and then some at Pennsylvania, outspending Hillary Clinton 3-to-1, traversing the state, and saturating its airwaves. The effort has pulled him out of his former 16-point ditch, but at the same time it has killed every shot he once had at pretending the Keystone State doesn’t matter to him. He admitted as much today, agreeing that a win is a win—and, implicitly, a loss is a loss.
But despite his best efforts, Obama doesn’t seem able to deliver the headshot. As Clinton herself asked today, “Why can’t he close the deal?”
The truth is, he can. No matter what happens tonight—well, barring an earth-shattering Clinton blowout—Obama will have an opportunity to snuff out Clinton’s candidacy over the coming weeks. Here’s how:
Drop a superdelegate bomb. Obama strategists say they have some superdelegates lined up to endorse after Pennsylvania votes. Time to line up some more. Obama has narrowed Clinton’s superdelegate lead to 22. If he were to erase that lead entirely in the day or two after Pennsylvania, the game would be over. Whether the trickle becomes a flood depends on the Pennsylvania margin. But either way, Clinton already needs about 80 percent of the remaining uncommitted superdelegates (not including add-ons) to catch up in the overall delegate count. The higher that number climbs, the bleaker the outlook.
Spend Hillary into the ground. Obama outspent Clinton threefold in Pennsylvania airtime. And the recent flurry of “response” ads has forced Clinton to spend when she would rather save. But he can afford it: In March, Obama raised twice as much cash as Clinton did and began April with $42 million in the bank for the primary, compared to her $9.3 million. With $10 million in debt, the Clinton camp is officially in the red. The more Obama can exploit this gap, the better for him. Clinton’s team can claim that it makes them the underdog, but expectations stop mattering toward the end of the race. After a certain point, the underdog just becomes the loser.
Go heavy on Indiana, light on North Carolina. If Clinton pulls off a narrow victory in Pennsylvania, all eyes will turn to Indiana as the next battleground. It looks to be a fair fight: Indiana has a large population of Clinton-friendly working-class whites, while Obama has a near-home court advantage. Recent polls show Obama leading there, but not irreversibly so. North Carolina, meanwhile, is a lock for Obama, which will only extend his pledged delegate lead. But right now the race is about superdelegates. And it’s Indiana where the remaining uncommitted supers will be looking for signs that Clinton lives.
Shift focus back to McCain. For a while there, Obama was dinging McCain as much as Clinton. (Albeit without much success—that “100 years” gambit didn’t go so well.) But a combination of Bitter-cling-elitist-gate and the looming Pennsylvania vote pulled him back into Primary-land. Over the next two weeks, Obama needs to strike a balance between knocking Clinton out and engaging McCain. But the two can also go hand in hand. Go after McCain’s economic plan flip-flop, hit him on the war, engage him on Iran. In other words, show that you can push McCain back on his heels. Because right now, Clinton’s entire candidacy rests on her claim that you can’t.
-
sponsorship
UPDATE 8:58 p.m.: NBC and Fox News have called the Pennsylvania primary for Hillary Clinton. Once you get past your initial excitement, it's clear that a win by one point and a win in the double-digits mean very different things. Earlier today we predicted what the different scenarios would mean for the race moving forward.
The choice metaphor for the campaign season is that the candidates are on the road to the White House. If that’s the case, then Pennsylvania’s primary is a five-way intersection for Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton. Behind them lies the wake of 45 primaries and caucuses, six former contenders, and hundreds of millions of dollars. In front of them are four branching paths, each of them leading to a new narrative that will determine when this whole shebang will end.
So, it is with only a pinch of tongue-in-cheek hyperbole that we suggest tonight’s results will change the course of this election. We tapped into our inner Nostradamus, rummaged around for our crystal ball, and read the tarot cards to predict what each path holds in store for the two candidates.
Hillary Clinton wins big (by 10 points or more): Emboldened by her victory, Clinton will certainly press on to Indiana and North Carolina. She almost certainly can’t win the Tarheel State, according to polls, so she’ll double-down on the Hoosiers and ignore Carolina, even though the latter has more pledged delegates.
Most important, this scenario justifies Clinton’s main plea to superdelegates: that Obama can’t win the big states needed for a November triumph. He’ll have lost Pennsylvania, California, New Jersey, Ohio, Florida (sort of), and Michigan (sort of). Granted, this argument is deeply flawed, but it’s still a convincing one on its surface, and it buys her some traction with the party elites.
Moreover, a double-digit victory implies that she cleaned house among white middle-class voters. That means she can spin the exit polls to suggest Obama’s “bitter” comments and the Rev. Wright flap have alienated him from middle-class voters that the party will need to beat John McCain in November. Again, this is an argument for superdelegates more than the average voter, but Clinton’s hopes rest primarily with supers at this point.
All of this means superdelegates will continue to refrain from forming a single-file line behind Obama and company. Plus, if turnout is high—which it’s reported to be—a big Clinton margin will help chip away at Obama’s popular vote lead. She needs to make up significant ground on that metric to convince supers to not vote for the guy with the lead in pledged delegates.
Clinton wins semi-impressively (by 5-10 points): She’s bought herself some time, but the end is still fast approaching. A win this size confirms that she’s still a force to be reckoned with in the party but that she still can’t bury Obama in contests that he singularly devotes his attention to. Obama has received 60 percent of the vote or more in 16 states; she has only done that once, in Arkansas. (Her biggest win outside of Arkansas and New York is in Oklahoma by 24 points, but Obama never campaigned in the state.)
She’ll stay in the race through Indiana and North Carolina, but superdelegates may start to slide toward Obama at an accelerating pace. An average-size victory in Pennsylvania makes the delegate math even more oppressive and makes Indiana a go-big-or-go-home affair. That’ll be tough to achieve if she has to do damage control in North Carolina and Obama feels secure enough in his Tarheel lead to double-down in Indiana.
The key drawback for Clinton is that a win of this size doesn’t change the narrative of the campaign. Pundits (guilty as charged) will still say that it’s just a matter of time before she drops out, and Obama will have batted away claims that his questionable comments and friendships have hurt his standing with the electorate.
Clinton wins narrowly (by .1-5 points): The Baja Men will re-emerge from anonymity to record a new smash hit: “Who Let the Superdelegates Out?” Expect uncommitted superdelegates to flock to Obama while a significant chunk of Clinton supers switch over to the other side. It’ll be like watching a fruit gradually go rotten over a series of weeks.
A Clinton win by a small margin means that the delegate math has completely buried her. She will be even deeper in pledged delegate debt, and now she’ll have no chance of catching Obama in the popular vote tally—even if Florida and Michigan are included. Couple that with a moral victory for Obama—even if he says he doesn’t believe in such things—and Clinton’s path to the nomination isn’t obstructed or blocked; it’s a dead end.
Making matters worse, a narrow victory means she can’t replenish her campaign’s wallet, which is feeling a little light lately. Without more money, she can’t air enough ads to combat the hefty amount of airtime Obama has been purchasing. If she can’t fight back over the air, then Obama’s allure becomes even more magnetizing.
Obama wins (by any amount): That’s it. It’s over. It’s just a matter of time. Expect a biblical exodus of superdelegates to Obama and mounting pressure for her to drop out. She probably won’t make it to Indiana and North Carolina. The deed is done.
-
sponsorship
It's no coincidence that the two most-repeated Clinton quotes of the past day are:
1) "Who do you think has what it takes?"
2) "I want the Iranians to know that if I'm the president, we will attack Iran. ... In the next 10 years, during which they might foolishly consider launching an attack on Israel, we would be able to totally obliterate them.”
The first quote comes from her closing argument ad, "Kitchen." The second she uttered during an interview yesterday with ABC News.
To be fair, the second bit is ripped from context. It’s meant to be a conditional—if Iran attacked Israel, then the U.S. would attack Iran. But Clinton uses much stronger language than ever before. And as Jake Tapper points out, she contradicts her own previous statement in an October debate that "I do not believe people running for president should engage in hypotheticals." When pushed on whether there are any conditions under which she would attack Iran, Clinton refused to answer. Now that caution is gone.
What accounts for the shift in rhetoric? It’s all part of her closing argument: Barack Obama is a wimp. That was the implication of the "Kitchen" ad—do you really want Obama dealing with Osama?—and it’s also the subtext of her Iran remarks. The reason she chose Iran, presumably, is that Iran is one foreign-policy issue on which you can’t look too hawkish. As Ben Smith puts it, she’s "almost daring Obama to criticize her as going overboard." Obama is already controversial among some Jewish leaders for what they see as a less-than-perfect stance on Israel (although many think he’s just fine) as well as his connections with Rev. Wright and pseudo-endorsement by Louis Farrakhan. This, like the Olympics boycott, is one issue on which Obama is not likely to challenge her aggressively.
It will be interesting to watch this debate play out in the general. John McCain would normally be delighted to hear that Clinton is willing to use nuclear deterrence to prevent an attack by Iran (and, yes, she's talking about nukes), except now that means he won't be able to paint her (or Obama) as a softie. So in a sense, Clinton might actually be doing Obama a favor here by pushing the Democratic debate rightward. If Obama can match her hawkishness on Iran—and right now, he really has no choice—he has a better shot at diffusing accusations of wimpery from McCain.
-
sponsorship
All three candidates gave short speeches yesterday introducing World Wrestling Entertainment's "Monday Night Raw." Hillary called herself “Hill-Rod,” Obama asked if you can “smell what Barack is cooking,” and John McCain threatened to let his “McCainiacs run wild on ya.” They should really do this before debates.
But the main event was an extended brawl between wrestlers/actors playing Clinton and Obama, with a Bill Clinton character thrown in for fun. The guy playing Obama looked like Mike Tyson with big prosthetic ears, while the Clinton actress looks like a character on Golden Girls. But it worked marvelously.
Probably not worth 10 minutes of your time, but fast forward to 5:48, where Obama lifts Clinton off her feet and performs “the Barack Bottom.”
It ends when a giant tattooed oaf named Umaga barges in (Bill to Hillary: “Honey, he’s gonna vote for you!”) and knocks them both out. An Al Gore metaphor, perhaps?
-
sponsorship
Here’s a fascinating historical parallel to the Pennsylvania primary, from Politico:
Political analysts point to the 2002 Democratic gubernatorial primary between Ed Rendell and Bob Casey Jr. as the closest comparison to the matchup between Obama and Clinton.
Rendell won that closely contested race with a coalition of African Americans and upscale, highly educated white voters—a coalition like the one assembled by Obama. Casey focused on blue collar workers, union households, lower-income individuals and ethnic white voters—strikingly similar to Clinton’s base in Pennsylvania.
Yet now each man is boosting the candidate of the opposite coalition. Rendell backs Clinton, even though Obama depends on the same combo of blacks and educated whites as Rendell did. And Casey backs Obama, even though Clinton appeals more to the working-class voters who put him in office.
It’s this kind of crossover that should make Democrats less concerned about party unity in the fall. If leaders with strong demographic associations like Casey and Rendell enthusiastically throw their weight behind the nominee, voters will follow.
On the other hand, Obama might be uncomfortable having Rendell pushing for him, now that this video has surfaced …