Get yer polls, bets, numbers & pretty graphs! Elections 2008

Who Won Super Tuesday?

It's hard to say, but if you put a gun in my head, I'd say John McCain and (very slightly) Hillary Clinton, but the elections revealed weaknesses in McCain and in both of the leading Democratic candidates. McCain blunted Mitt Romney's challenge, but he failed consistently to win over conservative voters. Hillary Clinton won the big states she had to win, and arrested Barack Obama's momentum, but she is going to have problems with white male voters. Obama is having trouble with white working-class voters and Latinos. Here is a rundown.

McCain beat Romney in California--that's the end of Romney. But McCain continues to depend on moderate, non-evangelical Republicans for his victories. In California, conservatives made up 62 percent of the primary electorate; McCain only won 30 percent of them. In Tennessee, 73 percent of the voters were conservatives; McCain won 22 percent. In Missouri, 65 percent were conservatives; McCain won 25 percent. In these states, McCain failed to win a majority of Republicans. And he might face a revolt of these conservatives in the fall. They won't vote for a Democrat, but they might not vote at all.

One group that is clearly dissatisfied with McCain are Republican evangelicals. In Tennessee, which Huckabee won, 73 percent of the primary voters described themselves as born-again Christians. McCain won 29 percent of these voters. In Missouri, 54 percent of voters described themselves this way; McCain won 24 percent. The other group that doesn't like McCain is Republicans who think illegal immigration is the most important issue. In California, 30 percent of the Republicans thought it was; 23 percent voted for Republicans; in Tennessee 25 percent thought it was the most important. Only 21 percent went for McCain. It's not clear how McCain can win these voters over.

Hillary Clinton won most of the big primary states, including California and Massachusetts. Obama won several important states, including Missouri and Connecticut, and, perhaps, more delegates, but many of his victories came in states like Georgia or Alabama that Democrats will not win in November or in caucus states dominated by left-wing activists who are unrepresentative either of the party or the fall electorate.

Clinton got pasted among blacks, but she should be able to win back those voters in November. What's more troubling is her vote among white males and among independents. In California, Clinton lost white men by a whopping 52 to 34 percent. She lost white independents by 58 to 30 percent. In California, 6.5 percent of those voters who didn't vote for Clinton said that gender of the candidate was "an important factor." One must assume that the actual percentage is higher (voters don't like to admit to prejudice) and that many of those voters who would not want to vote for a woman, but who potentially could vote for a Democrat, did not vote at all in the primaries, but will be around in the general election.

Obama, as I previously noted, had trouble with white working-class voters. In New Jersey, which a Democrat pretty much will have to win in November, Obama won only 31 percent of the white vote. Over 11 percent of those who voted against Obama (a group that might also include some Latinos) said that race was an important factor in their vote. Here, too, one must assume that the actual percentage is higher and that it would be even higher among voters in a general election. Democrats can win a state like Connecticut without winning these voters, but it won't win most of the big Middle Atlantic and Midwestern states without them.

If the economy plummets, and Iraq goes up in flames, or if there is a conservative revolt against McCain, then Clinton or Obama could win with some ease in November, but if conditions are muddier, and if McCain is able to win over the Republican base, then the Democrats could be in trouble. McCain should be able to hold the Deep South and much of the Southwest against a Democrat. He will do well among Latinos in the Southwest (especially, perhaps, against Obama). In states like Nevada, Colorado, and New Mexico, he could build a coalition of Republicans, independents, and a share of Latinos.

Democrats will have to win the Far West, the Middle West, the Northeast, and the Middle Atlantic states, and perhaps pick off a border state like Arkansas or Tennessee. White working-class voters make up a majority in many of the key Midwestern and Middle Atlantic states. If a Democrat can't win a majority of these voters in a state like Pennsylvania, Missouri, or Ohio, they'll have trouble winning the election. And as February 5 indicated, both Clinton and Obama are going to have trouble with these voters. Who would have more trouble? My feeling is that it's a standoff. Hillary has less of a handicap than Obama, but she is not his equal as a politician.

--John B. Judis

What's more troubling is [Hillary's] vote among white males and among independents. In California, Clinton lost white men by a whopping 52 to 34 percent. [..] In California, 6.5 percent of those voters who didn't vote for Clinton said that gender of the candidate was "an important factor." One must assume that the actual percentage is higher (voters don't like to admit to prejudice) and that many of those voters who would not want to vote for a woman, but who potentially could vote for a Democrat, did not vote at all in the primaries, but will be around in the general election.

THE DEMOCRATIC RACE FROM HERE.

Now that the dust is settling from Super Tuesday's Super Stalemate, the Democratic contest looks headed for a bright February for Barack Obama, though March, April and May may tilt towards Hillary Clinton. This weekend, the Democrats hold a primary in Louisiana and caucuses in Nebraska, Maine and Washington state, and the following Tuesday, hold primaries in Maryland, Virginia and D.C. Obama could well sweep all of these. On the Tuesday after that, the 19th, there are two primaries, one in Obama's native Hawaii, the other in Wisconsin, which could well prove to be a key contest.

Wisconsin has been holding primaries for a much longer time than most states; it provided a key victory to John Kennedy in 1960 and to Eugene McCarthy in 1968. (Indeed, facing the prospect of a two-to-one defeat at McCarthy's hands, Lyndon Johnson announced two days before the primary that he would not seek re-election.) Wisconsin Democrats have a long reformist tradition, as current Senator Russ Feingold could attest, and it is also home to a large white working-class vote as well. In short, it could provide the major showdown of February between Clinton and Obama, and gives Obama the opportunity to break through among the white working class voters he'll need to win in subsequent contests.

After Wisconsin, the terrain turns more Clinton-friendly. On March 4th, both Texas and Ohio hold primaries. Outside of Austin and the African American neighborhoods of Houston and Dallas, the state looks like a natural for Clinton, particularly in view of its large Latino vote. In Ohio, Obama will surely have strength in Cleveland and in the growing liberal activist communities around Columbus, but Ohio Democrats tend to be more culturally conservative, working class, white and rural than their counterparts in most big states. This will be a hard state for Obama to win, but he needs to do well there to offset Texas and some later states like Indiana, which demographically is like Ohio minus Columbus and Cleveland.

Pennsylvania, on April 22, poses a special challenge to Obama. The last time I looked, it had the highest median age of any state but Florida. Obama's core supporters -- younger voters -- tend not to hang around the Rustbelt states; they migrate to states offering greater economic opportunities. Obama will certainly win votes in and around Philadelphia, but the rest of the state may be difficult for him to carry, most especially the land that time forgot -- all the abandoned mine and mill towns in the middle of the state that haven't had any new residents move in since the 1940s. It will be interesting to see if the United Steelworkers, who actively supported John Edwards until he dropped out, chooses to endorse Obama or Clinton as the action moves to the states where it once was a powerhouse, and still has some clout.

States that vote in May, besides Indiana, include North Carolina and Kentucky. North Carolina's "Research Triangle" seems the kind of place that Obama could carry, but the Upper South, where the African American population is a good deal smaller than it is in the Deep South states that Obama has won, is probably Clinton country until proven otherwise.

Or, as my friend Ron Brownstein might put it, February is a wine track month, but March, April and May look good for beer track candidates. Obama has to win more working-class whites to do well enough in the closing primaries to go to the convention with a fighting chance. He'll be better funded than Clinton, which means he'll have more on the air and more on the ground, but he needs to use those advantages to pick up voters he's still having some trouble winning.

--Harold Meyerson

Obama won several important states, including Missouri and Connecticut, and, perhaps, more delegates, but many of his victories came in states like Georgia or Alabama that Democrats will not win in November ...

Where The Democratic Race Is Now

[..] Hillary Clinton won the votes of more Democrats than Barack Obama did. She won the votes of enough "red" states to temper, at least for now, the idea that Democrats in those states believe she is manifestly unelectable and would drag the party down in their states.

Over the next two weeks, the caucus and primaries ahead are better for Obama than for Clinton, and he should close the delegate map a little. Or maybe a lot: he tends to win the states in which he competes and Clinton does not by a large margin. Obama has been on the air in all nine states... Clinton is not... [..]

Nothing in the Democratic results tonight will change the minds of those Superdelegates, at least 500 of whom haven't told us who they're supporting. They're not likely to come off the fence, and arguably, this is a little better at this point for Hillary Clinton because Obama, heading into tonight, had started to pick up superdelegates off of his South Carolina momentum.

Last day deciders chose Hillary Clinton, which suggests that she "won" news coverage following the first national debate and is a reason why she's accepting debate invitations center and left. (They essentially tied among last-three day deciders.)

Clinton was ahead in the national polls in most of the states two weeks ago. But Obama has closed 20 points nationally. He is no longer the underdog [..]

The defection of black voters to Barack Obama continues to hurt Hillary Clinton and has not ebbed. Obama won black voters by more than Clinton won among Hispanics voters; Obama took 44% of them in Arizona and most of them in Illinois. Nowhere did Hillary Clinton receive more than 25% of the black vote. [..]

Privately, the Obama campaign wanted big upsets. Connecticut is not a big upset. Privately, the Clinton campaign wanted to win their states decisively. This is a dogfight. [..]

Thanks to Obama's margins in Georgia and Illinois and his competitiveness in New Jersey, he may wind up winning more delegates than Clinton.

Obama won all six caucus states by huge margins, evidence of a failure of will on the Clinton campaign to do any organizing there.

The white males who preferred John Edwards in the South seem to have chosen Barack Obama. We see this in states as diverse as Georgia and California. Nationally, Obama won white men of all income levels and white men with college degrees. White men without college degrees chose Hillary Clinton. White crossover independent men powered Obama's vote in California and other open states.

Hola, Puerto Rico!

So now what?

[..] We're way past talking about states, which make for nice graphics on television broadcasts but are next to meaningless when it comes to capturing the nomination. This is all about delegates now. And the math suggests this is going to keep going on for a while - quite possibly, all the way to the national convention.

Here's why: To capture the Democratic nomination, a candidate needs 2,025 delegates [..] both Clinton and Obama are at about 1,000 delegates right now. That means either one would needs 1,025 more delegates to win the nomination.

Now here's the tough part. In the remaining primaries and caucuses, only 1,787 delegates are at stake. So to win the nomination on pledged delegates alone, a candidate has to win 57 percent of those at stake. And that won't be so easy to do.

Remember, the Democrats don't have winner-take-all contests anymore. The primaries and caucuses award delegates with formulas that are based on proportional representation. In a situation where two candidates, each with solid funding, are running strong, it will be difficult to run up large margins. [..]

Obviously, the super-delegates could play a key role if they start to swing one way or the other. Here, I wonder, whether major endorsements - from still-undeclared unions (like SEIU) or former candidates (Al Gore or John Edwards) - could come into play. And don't forget there's the whole Florida-Michigan fiasco to sort out.

On the other hand, it's also possible that super-delegates will wait until the last possible minute before declaring - and that even some pledged superdelegates might start to waver, either because they've changed their minds or it becomes in their political interest to do so. (Yes, there will be deal-making.) If super-delegates shift to uncommitted, then the threshhold for winning the nomination will go up.

Does that mean we're headed to a brokered convention in August? Josh Marshall seems to think so. And while it still seems unlikely to me, it certainly seems a great deal more possible than it did 24 hour ago. [..]

[W]e should stop playing up every contest as a chance for one candidate or the other to lock up the nomination - which clearly isn't going to happen anytime soon - and settle in for a protracted contest.

Who knows, it may all come down to the contest on June 7 -- in Puerto Rico.

I think it's interesting because it belies the simple "change vs experience" take on it. It's saying that Obama voters think he's also experienced enough -- that he's most qualified.

California Racial Composition

[..] I owe SurveyUSA [..] congratulations: they alone constructed a likely-voter screen that predicted the amazing, historically unprecedented surge in Latino turnout, which accounts for Hillary's margin of victory. The Field poll, which predicted Obama winning very narrowly and which I'd assumed would be close to correct, actually got more or less the right breakdown within each racial group (the white vote was split equally between the two).

What they (and I) missed, by a mile, was the racial composition of the electorate. They predicted 20 percent Latino/12 percent black. It was actually 29 percent Latino/6 percent black (a decline in relative black turnout since 2004, and a near doubling in relative Latino turnout), which could mark a major turning point in California Democratic politics.

What this suggests is that Latinos aren't going for Hillary by default or thanks to name recognition: there appears to be a genuine and positive enthusiasm for Hillary in the Latino community. (She also ran up surprisingly big margins among Asians, 75-23.)

He did slightly better among Latinos elsewhere--losing only 55-41 in Arizona, for example--but this is going to be a major hurdle for him in Texas on March 4. Judis was right.

When Will the Wounds Heal?
February 6, 2008; Page A4
A basic law of primary seasons is that the longer they go on, the nastier they get.

With Super Tuesday past, that law seems to be in full effect, especially for Democrats. Whatever else yesterday's voting may have done, it did a good job of laying bare the divides within each party. More than that, it may have exacerbated the splits.

The Democratic fight between Sens. Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton seems certain to continue, and it is showing a clear divide between whites and blacks, between Hispanics and non-Hispanics, between women and men, and between older and younger voters.

Among Republicans, the primaries may have tilted the race toward Arizona Sen. John McCain, but they also have widened the gap between his party's moderates, who see him as a champion, and the conservatives who have lined up behind former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney or former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee.

Why Clinton Won In Massachusetts

I lived in Massachsuetts for a long time before moving to Michigan, so it's a state I know well. And looking at the regional breakdown there, the ethnic and racial divide is not surprising. But I find it striking all the same.

With 70 percent of Boston's precincts reporting, Obama is winning by a modest margin (52 to 46 percent), presumably reflecting the support of his now-familiar coalition of college students, young professionals, and African-Americans. Among cities where the counting is finished, Obama won in the upscale Boston suburbs of Brookline, Lexington, Wellsley, plus he won easily in the college towns of Amherst.

But Clinton won in Massachusetts because of huge margins she ran up in blue-collar cities full of white ethnic and (some) Latino voters. In Fall River, Lowell, and Worcester, she beat Obama by two-to-one. (African-American voters seem to have kept the vote close in Springfield.)

I'm not entirely surprised. My wife's family lives in Leicester -- a small, heavily Irish Catholic town just west of Worcester. When we visited there in December, Clinton was the overwhelming favorite. Over the last two weeks, I heard a lot of wavering; Kennedy's endorsement, I suspect, got a lot of people thinking.

But in the end, it seems, most of the town ended up where it started. Clinton carried Leicester, 1297 votes to Obama's 631. [..]

--Jonathan Cohn

Obama's White Problem

Delaware [..] tells an interesting, and disturbing, story about the battle for the nomination between Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama.

While Obama won the state, he did so because of overwhelming support from black voters, who made up 27 percent of the primary electorate and went for Obama by a stupendous 89 to 11 percent. That's the kind of margin one would expect if Obama were running against George W. Bush, not Hillary Clinton. If you look at the reason, it seems to have been a backlash vote. According to the exit polls, 54 percent of Obama's supporters thought that Hillary Clinton attacked Obama "unfairly."

By contrast, Clinton won the white vote by 56 to 33 percent (with nine percent to favorite son Joe Biden). She won whites over 60 years old by 62 to 25 percent (with 14 percent to Biden).

Did race figure in this vote? I think so, although it's not clear how much. According to exit polls, 19 percent of voters thought "the race of the candidate" was "important" in deciding their vote. Of those, 49 percent went for Clinton or Biden and 52 percent for Obama. That means that race played a role in one out of five votes and that one of ten voters--presumably whites--voted against Obama at least partly because of his race. In so far as these voters would tend to understate the degree to which race influenced their voters, these are chilling figures.

-- John B. Judis

That is a chilling number. On the other hand, I'd caution about generalizing too much from the racial dynamics of Delaware. As Joe Biden was fond of saying on the campaign trail, much of southern Delaware is basically the South. I'd add that it's the South without the cosmopolitanism. In the actual South, there tend to be large cities with affluent, educated urbanites, surrounded by (to varying degrees) moderate white suburbs. Georgia is a great example of this, as are North and South Carolina and Virginia. So while you'd rather not see a split like this, it's not altogether surprising or, for that matter, alarming.