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Among the many assumptions swirling around the Democratic race, one has been that open primaries—elections in which independents and Republicans can also vote—benefit Obama. He’s been viewed as the bridge builder with broader appeal. But that appears to be changing. As John Judis points out in the New Republic,
[Obama] is now receiving his strongest support from voters who see themselves as "very liberal." In Pennsylvania, he defeated Clinton among "very liberal" voters by 55 to 45 percent, but lost "somewhat conservative" voters by 53 to 47 percent and moderates by 60 to 40 percent. In Wisconsin and Virginia, by contrast, he had done best against Clinton among voters who saw themselves as moderate or somewhat conservative.
It’s been generally accepted that Obama’s association with the Rev. Wright and Bill Ayers and his “bitter” comment didn’t hurt him much in Pennsylvania or nationally, because polls didn’t show any major backlash. (That is, if you’re willing to buy into the narrative that they mattered in the first place.) But those polls mostly involved likely Democratic voters. In Pennsylvania, which held a closed primary, that obviously doesn’t include independents and Republicans. So whereas those flaps may not have hurt Obama’s support among Democrats, it could turn out they hurt him quite a bit among other voters.
The test will be Indiana, which holds its open primary on May 6. If it’s true that Obama is now pegged as a liberal, Clinton may have a significant advantage. Obama currently holds a lead in the state, but again, those polls mostly deal with likely Democratic voters.
Clinton is even better off if you factor in the “Limbaugh effect”—the theory that Republicans pulled the lever for Hillary in Mississippi and Ohio in order to disrupt the Democratic race. Although again, things may have changed. According to the logic of the Limbaugh effect, Republicans voted for Hillary because they think she’s damaged goods. But now, after six weeks of WrightAyersBitterClingElitistgate, it could be Obama who they see as the more vulnerable candidate, which might lead them to vote for him. If I were Obama, I'd do as much as I can to tick off Rush Limbaugh between now and May 6.
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For the past few months, Hillary Clinton has emphasized that wins in big Democratic states like California, New York, and Pennsylvania make her more likely to beat John McCain in February. That, to say the least, has no factual grounds whatsoever. (Jeff Greenfield detailed why back in March.) The essential point: Just because women, the working class, and Catholics aren't voting for Obama now doesn't mean they won't vote for him come November. The same applies for Obama's base of African-Americans, educated voters, and young people: Just because they vote overwhelmingly against Hillary Clinton now doesn't mean they'll vote for John McCain in November. Sure, Clinton might be better suited for November because she won California, but there's simply no way to know.
A few friends and I were batting this idea around our inboxes this week, trying to come up with the best metaphor to explain why winning the primary doesn't guarantee success in the general. It was surprisingly hard. The best we could come up with:
Being a top flight relief pitcher doesn't make you the favorite to win the Cy Young Award.
Beating out all the other Idol wannabes down at the local karaoke one Saturday night doesn't mean Simon won't tear you a new one once you get to Hollywood.
Doing well in a qualifying heat for a NASCAR event doesn't mean you're going to win the race. You've got a different track, different weather, and different variables on the day of the real thing.
Needless to say, you can do better. E-mail TrailheadContest@gmail.com and submit your best metaphors debunking Clinton's logic. We'll publish the best ones later on.
UPDATE 5:32 p.m.: We're already getting some great entries, and I want to make one thing a bit clearer. We're not exactly looking for what the difference is between the primary and the general election, but rather a metaphor for why winning among Democrats in the primary doesn't mean you'll do better among all voters in the general election. A helpful hint that some readers have passed along, nicely summarized by Jack Davis:
Reverse the metaphor—it's not about the candidates, it's about the selection process of a voter/shopper/consumer—and what choice they will make given the alternative.
Feel free to keep sending the primary/general-election metaphors in, but try and tease out that other metaphorical conundrum if you're feeling up for a challenge. Also, all e-mail can be quoted unless requested otherwise.
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It must be nice to be Hillary Clinton right now. Adoring fans have
given her $10 million. The media have started to believe that she can
actually win. Jeremiah Wright is coming out of hibernation just in time
to derail Obama's candidacy once and for all. Sure, her chances of
winning the nomination are on the rise (by 1.4 points, to 12.1 percent). But you know what? She still can't win.
First, the good news: Raising $10 million in the 30 or so hours
after her win in Pennsylvania is a very good thing. It means people
still care about her, superdelegates can still trust her, and she can
still buy Star Trek pantsuits.
The money bomb is an impressive fiscal feat for Clinton. Even better,
it upstages Obama on his best political attribute—fundraising prowess...
Read more at the Hillary Deathwatch.
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We're hoping to start including more reader responses in our posts, so here's a good place to start. One reader, Mike, weighs in on yesterday's post about McCain's letter to the North Carolina GOP about its ad invoking Jeremiah Wright:
I think you've got it backwards with your interpretation of McCain's letter.
As the Boston Globe story you linked to with respect to Bush vs. McCain in 2000, it wasn't the Bush "campaign" that attacked McCain over the alleged out-of-wedlock daughter, it was "anonymous pollsters." Bush got the best of both worlds, as a result: McCain is damaged but Bush retains plausible deniability, since he could claim that he wasn't responsible for the attacks.
Obama's reaction seems on-target. If John McCain and the RNC really wanted the ad taken off the air, it would be. If they didn't want it aired, it wouldn't have been. As the party's presumptive new leader, the NC GOP wouldn't ignore with McCain said, unless it was said with a wink at the same time. Similarly, the NC GOP isn't going to want to piss off the RNC, especially since the RNC is the only Republican committee that has significantly outraised its Democratic counterpart (unlike the congressional and senate campaign committees), and the NC GOP will want some of those resources.
Rather, what you're going to see throughout the election is a replay of this over and over: non-McCain/RNC group uses racist/ xenophobic/ dishonest/ misleading/ fear-mongering ad > McCain and RNC demand that the ad be taken off the air and repudiate it > ad may or may not be taken off the air (really irrelevant at this point) > ad is replayed hundreds of times by Fox News, CNN, MSNBC, the Daily Show/Colbert Report, and any other outlet.
McCain then gets to take credit for taking the high route (which you gave in your post), bolsters his reputation as a maverick/"a different kind of Republican" and yet still benefits because the ad is still out there hurting Obama, and the best part is, now Republicans don't even have to pay for it to be aired, the media does it for them free of charge.
Its the model set by the famous LBJ ad showing a mushroom cloud with the phrase "In your heart, you know he might" referring to Goldwater using nukes in the cold war. It was only aired once by the Johnson campaign, but is the most famous political ad in history because it was so outrageous that even when it was pulled from the air, it was all anyone talked about. With today's mass media echo chamber, this kind of a strategy for getting a message out there is even more effective.
I think you're right, and I probably should have been a little more cautious about giving McCain the benefit of the doubt. Given what we've seen, there's every reason to be skeptical of candidates claiming to run clean campaigns. But I still think McCain could be an improvement. The whole "illegitimate black daughter" smear was so disgusting and hurtful that you'd think McCain would try to avoid sinking to that level. (Or I suppose you could argue he'd feel more justified doing it.) But there are other signs, too: He avoids publicly discussing his son in Iraq, even when it would be perfectly appropriate to do so. His stances on immigration and global warming are pretty nonopportunistic, too. Sure, he's a politician and will no doubt deliver plenty of low blows. And Obama could well bring out the worst in him, given his well-documented contempt for the junior senator. But on the spectrum of skeeviness, I think McCain leans toward the decent human being side. Of course, he has plenty of time to prove me wrong.
Got your own thoughts on recent items? Don't be shy.
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Hillary Clinton is screwed. Oh wait, she has a chance.
Actually, she’s screwed again. Hold up, she’s about to win!
The media can’t seem to make up its mind. Now, in the
post-Pennsylvania lull, journalists are deciding that in fact Clinton can
win. Over at The Fix, Chris Cillizza maps
out her path to the nomination. The
Wall Street Journal’s A1 proclaims,
“Clinton Win Stirs Doubts on Obama.” The New
York Times discusses
Obama’s “struggle to win over key blocs.”
Here’s what I don’t understand about all this: Clinton
was going to win Pennsylvania all along, just
as she was always going to win Ohio and Obama
is going to win North Carolina.
The only huge upset in this race has been New Hampshire. Otherwise, demographics have
decided everything. Sure, Obama is having trouble winning over “key voting blocs”
like seniors and the white working class. But that has been the story of this race
all along.
To be sure, the fact that voters aren’t coalescing around
Obama might worry some superdelegates. What
does it mean that he can’t “close the deal”? Democrats are used to having
the nominee decided early in the race, so the ongoing split is seen as a
weakness. The biggest concerns center on the fear that Clinton voters will ditch Obama for McCain. But
there’s evidence that abandonment cuts both ways. The Times piece points out that Pennsylvania
exit polls show “69 percent of white Democrats would vote for Mr. Obama in a
general election campaign over Mr. McCain; 73 percent of black Democrats said
they would vote for Mrs. Clinton over Mr. McCain.” That’s not a huge
difference.
But more importantly, the landscape is guaranteed to change
by November, and supers know this. McCain will make some dumb comments, as
would Clinton
were she to win the nomination. For superdelegates to shift to Clinton now on vague “electability”
grounds despite the delegate count would require a supreme lack of confidence in Obama, not to mention some serious
chutzpah.
Clinton’s
“path
to the nomination,” meanwhile, does exist. She could win Indiana,
raise truckloads of money, find some way to count Florida in the popular vote, and get Obama
to shoot himself repeatedly in both feet. All the while, she needs to run a
perfect campaign. But even then, superdelegates will have to look themselves in
the mirror and justify overturning the presidential victory of the first black
presidential nominee. If, after that, Clinton
somehow lost in November, would Obama’s base ever forgive them?
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Even as Hillary Clinton trails Barack Obama in pledged delegates, the popular vote, and number of states won, she has made it clear that she plans to stay in the race for the nomination. All of which brings me to this logical conclusion: It is time for Barack Obama to drop out.
If Clinton had the good of the Democratic Party in mind, she would have given up her bid the day after the Mississippi primary, which Obama won by 25 points. The delegate math was as dismal for her campaign then as it is now, even after Pennsylvania, and she was facing down a six-week gulf before the next election.
But Hillary Clinton isn’t going to drop out. There simply isn’t a function in her assembly code for throwing in the towel.
Obama, on the other hand, is fully capable of it. And if he’s really serious about representing a new kind of politics, now is the time for him to prove it in the only meaningful way left. Moreover, were he to play it right, dropping out now nearly guarantees that he’ll be elected president in 2012. Here’s the roadmap:
Obama drops out next week, stating that although he could almost certainly win the nomination by fighting it out until the convention in August, he is simply not willing to drag the party through a battle that will cripple its chances against John McCain. He then pledges to help support Sen. Clinton in her bid—with full knowledge that she will not take him up on the offer.
In one stroke, Obama will regain his messiah creds by making the ultimate sacrifice for the good of the party. His followers will be furious. The mere mention of Clinton’s name will provoke unspeakable acts. They will abandon Clinton in numbers sufficient to hand McCain the election in November.
Losing the presidency again after eight years of Bush will ruin the Democratic Party. It will become obvious that Clinton’s decision to stay in the race was the turning point in the election. The base will turn its wrath on party leaders like Howard Dean and Nancy Pelosi, who failed to push Clinton out. Obama, as the de facto head of the party, will broker negotiations to install new leaders loyal to him.
McCain will be eminently more beatable in 2012. Demographics will continue to shift in Obama’s favor as his 14- to 17-year-old supporters come of voting age. Anyone foolish enough to challenge Obama for the nomination—and don’t rule out Clinton—will go nowhere. Obama’s utopian vision for a Democratic party unified around him will be complete. QED.