Overall, the graphs show that since Super Tuesday, at the beginning of February (over 3 months ago), Hillary has been losing ground to Obama. That's a clear trend, clear momentum, in his direction, and it hasn't changed, even after Rev. Wright, even after Hillary "finding her voice." From ABC, via Ben Smith:
1. Delegates won in the primaries and caucuses:
2. Superdelegates - i.e., members of Congress, Governors, DNC officials. (Note: I added the last data point, for May 13 (today)):
Honestly, go ahead. At this point, I'd love nothing better than to see an all-out war in the Democratic party, instigated by Hillary and Bill Clinton. The DNC, God bless 'em, is afraid to take Hillary on. The Democrats in Congress are afraid to take her on. The superdelegates across the board are afraid to take her on. We are a party of fear. Not the Republican kind of fear, that they project outwards on to voters, we internalize our fear and become sniveling wimps. There's a reason that Republicans always brand us as the party of weaklings, it's because sometimes we are. And it's sickening. And it's why people like George Bush and Hillary Clinton are able to step all over our leaders, and repeatedly undermine our agenda. Because we let them, and they know we'll let them. So at this point, I welcome a Democratic civil war to finally clear out the wimp wing, and I suspect the Netroots, in tandem with the black community, will be leading the charge. If it takes spending the rest of this year attacking Hillary instead of John McCain, then so be it. I don't want another President Clinton if it's going to mean four more years of Republican-lite and another stolen election.
You'll know it will be a mediocre to bad night for Obama if his campaign has to talk about who won the most delegates tonight, rather than by how much they won each state.
Okay, so, let's get this straight. The metric for winning the Democratic nomination is the number of delegates you win. But, NBC is telling us, that if Obama wins more delegates than Hillary tonight, and expands his lead over her, then he'd better not talk about it or else that will be a sign that he really lost.
What a load of crap. Under this logic, how does Obama win tonight? By winning more votes and NOT winning more delegates? Under that scenario, you just know NBC and all the other pundits-who-won't-give-up would say "wow, Obama didn't gain a single delegate tonight, he's in trouble." The mainstream media loves a good fight. They know this is over. It's been over for months. But they just can't stop enjoying watching Hillary destroy our nominee. So they spout crap like this, saying that delegates don't really matter when delegates are the only thing that matters.
What's been missing from this discussion of Florida's and Michigan's delegates is an acknowledgment that Florida and Michigan were told what would happen if they broke the rules - they'd lose their delegates - they told the DNC "screw you," and broke the rules anyway, so they lost their delegates. Now, with Hillary's help, they're acting like "gee, how did that happen?" Uh, it happened because your state officials (the Republican legislature, in the case of Florida) chose to break the rules knowing full well that the price would be losing your delegates. Got a gripe about having lost your voice at the Democratic convention? Have a little chat with your state officials. But please, let's stop this little charade of pretending like losing your delegates was a big surprise. Hillary's own top advisers helped put the delegate plan into place. Everyone knew what would happen, but they did it anyway.
Hillary has made such a big deal about Michigan and Florida (because it's the only way she can now steal the election), that you have to wonder why she'd keep as two of her top advisers men who were responsible for taking those states' delegates away. I mean, imagine two of your top advisers being responsible for what you claim is your number one grievance, and then keeping them as your top advisers? If Hillary really cared about Michigan and Florida, she'd fire Ickes and McCauliffe.
Harold Ickes, a top adviser to Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton's campaign who voted for Democratic Party rules that stripped Michigan and Florida of their delegates, now is arguing against the very penalty he helped pass.
In a conference call Saturday, the longtime Democratic Party member contended the DNC should reconsider its tough sanctions on the two states, which held early contests in violation of party rules. He said millions of voters in Michigan and Florida would be otherwise disenfranchised - before acknowledging moments later that he had favored the sanctions.
"You won't deny us seats at the convention," he [Senator Levin] said.
"Carl, take it to the bank," I [McCauliffe] said. "They will not get a credential. The closest they'll get to Boston will be watching it on television. I will not let you break this entire nominating process for one state. The rules are the rules. If you want to call my bluff, Carl, you go ahead and do it."
*** We can stop the delegate math: Turning to the delegate math, if Clinton nets approximately 16 delegates out of Pennsylvania, she'll trail in the pledged battle by 150 delegates. With just 408 pledged delegates remaining, that means she'd need 68% of all pledged delegates left to overtake Obama. Now, if Obama and Clinton simply split the 187 delegates up for grabs on May 6 basically down the middle (which would be a rosy projection in Clinton's favor) and Obama's pledged delegate lead simply stayed at 150 and didn’t grow to 160 (the most likely outcome in two weeks), Clinton would need to win 85% of the then 221 remaining delegates up for grabs. 85%! As we mentioned on air last night, the battle for pledged delegates is over, Obama will win that metric and win it by some 100+ delegates.
I'm really getting sick of Hillary's crap. Fighting tough is welcome. Fighting dirty is not. I liked Hillary. Joe and I reached out to her campaign to help them two years ago. Now, I'm starting to wonder if even a small portion of the past vilification of the Clintons wasn't justified. I mean, urging your donors, for all intents and purposes, to blackmail the Democratic party? In essence, telling your donors that if you can't be the nominee then the Democrats should lose the election? (And that's exactly what's happening. Hillary wants the DNC to seat the delegates from the non-election that happened in Florida after the state willfully violated DNC rules, knowing full well what would happen if they did. Now Hillary wants all those delegates seated, from the non-election, so she can steal the election from Obama). Is it any wonder that 25% of Hillary's supporters say they won't support Obama in the general election? Hillary is the one telling them that they shouldn't support Obama, that they shouldn't support their own party. Howard Dean should tell Hillary Lieberman stop her crap, now, or resign from the Democratic party. Contrary to Her Majesty's thinking, there are other Democrats worthy of leading our country. Read more about Hillary's latest attempt to steal the election, from the NYT.
Clinton wiped away the debate last night with a robust victory in Ohio and a narrow win in Texas. But as she vowed to keep campaigning, the tight vote in Texas signaled she may yet face a tough decision in coming weeks. The slim margin in the Texas popular vote and an additional caucus process in which she trailed made clear that she would not win enough delegates to put a major dent in Sen. Barack Obama's lead. And regardless of the results, she emerged from the crucible of Ohio and Texas with a campaign mired in debt and riven by dissension...
[I]t would be enormously difficult for Clinton to overtake Obama in the pledged delegates chosen by voters in primaries and caucuses. By some calculations, Clinton would need to win more than 60 percent of the vote in the dozen contests remaining between now and June 7 to catch Obama in pledged delegates -- a steep challenge given that, so far, she has won that much in only one state, her onetime adopted home of Arkansas. Even in New York, where she is a sitting senator, she won 57 percent of the vote. She won 55 percent in Michigan, where Obama was not even on the ballot.
"Her durability is impressive if not astonishing, but she is still looking at some pretty cold, hard numbers in the race," said Jim Jordan, a Democratic strategist who initially ran the 2004 primary campaign of Sen. John F. Kerry (D-Mass.). "She's running out of time, she's running out of space." He described a Clinton nomination even with wins in Texas and Ohio as "impossible, really."
Markos points out what everyone has been writing for days. With 1,000 or so delegates remaining to be won before yesterday, Hillary may have picked up 2. One-third of the total remaining delegates were on the table, and she got 2 (so far). If she keeps going at this pace, after yesterday "huge" victory, she can get 4 more before the race is over. That does nothing to get her any closer to the 157 delegates she needs to overtake Obama. From Markos:
So total for the night, thus far, is Clinton 187 186 and Obama 185. Not all votes are in, so things will change a bit. But at this point, we have a ridiculously tiny one-delegate lead for Clinton for the night, which could either produce her first delegate victory of the election, or be erased by the rest of the still-not-reported Texas caucuses.
Now according to both the Clinton and Obama campaigns, Obama entered the race with a 159 pledged delegate lead. So with some luck, Clinton ends the night about ... 157 delegates behind.
More problematic for Clinton, is that today's 370 delegates were about 38 percent of the just-shy of 1,000 remaining delegates before Tuesday's contests. That means we just had over 1/3rd of the remaining delegates allocated, with only marginal-to-none gains in the count for Clinton.
So Clinton is running out of states, and even her "big" victory Tuesday is proving little more than a pyrrhic victory.
She can't win. But she can ensure that Obama is so bloodied, to use Rush Limbaugh's description of the Clinton strategy, that Obama is damaged goods come the fall. After all, if Hillary can't get the nomination, then nobody should. While I respect the arguments that the lengthy primary process has skyrocketed Democratic turnout and organizing, it's also tearing us and our candidates apart. And get ready for Team Clinton to go even more negative after last night. That means more racism and more made-for-GOP-TV statements about how John McCain is the most experienced candidate for president.
Saturday? The current wisdom is that Obama will win more delegates in Texas because of the combined caucus/primary system. So, they split the 4 states, 2 for 2. What remains to be seen is how many, if any, net delegates Hillary picks up tonight. I.e., can she inch closer to Obama's delegate numbers or not? And, as we've written before, it still doesn't matter because the math says she can't catch up.
"This election will come down to delegates.... Again and again, this race has shown that it is voters and delegates who matter, not the pundits or perceived 'momentum.'" - Mark Penn, chief strategist for Hillary's campaign, Feb. 13, 2008
CNN, at least, is talking about "the math". If they focus on the math and Clinton fails to make significant delegate gains today, it'll be a blow to the Clintons' "momentum" strategy. (A strategy, btw, that still fails to account for simple arithmetic.)
Markos is right. It doesn't matter if the media perceives Hillary getting "momentum" tonight if she doesn't get enough delegates to catch up with Obama. This is a 50-state election. She lost too many other states by too much of a margin to catch up with Obama's delegate total at this late date. But the media almost seems to feel that they're being unfair by admitting this, so they don't. They talk about Hillary possibly getting her mojo back, but don't bother telling you that it doesn't matter. If she can't get the delegates, she loses. And according to every analysis out there, she can't get them.
Hillary Clinton may be poised for a big night tonight, with wins in Ohio, Texas and Rhode Island. Clinton aides say this will be the beginning of her comeback against Barack Obama. There's only one problem with this analysis: they can't count.
I'm no good at math either, but with the help of Slate’s Delegate Calculator I've scoped out the rest of the primaries, and even if you assume huge Hillary wins from here on out, the numbers don't look good for Clinton. In order to show how deep a hole she's in, I've given her the benefit of the doubt every week for the rest of the primaries....
[Suppose] [s]he has enjoyed a string of 16 victories in a row over three months.
So at the end of regulation, Hillary's the nominee, right? Actually, this much-too-generous scenario (which doesn't even account for Texas's weird "pri-caucus" system, which favors Obama in delegate selection) still leaves the pledged-delegate score at 1,634 for Obama to 1,576 for Clinton. That's a 58-delegate lead.
Let's say the Democratic National Committee schedules do-overs in Florida and (heavily African-American) Michigan. Hillary wins big yet again. But the chances of her netting 56 delegates out of those two states would require two more huge margins. (Unfortunately the Slate calculator isn't helping me here.) So no matter how you cut it, Obama will almost certainly end the primaries with a pledged-delegate lead, courtesy of all those landslides in February. Hillary would then have to convince the uncommitted superdelegates to reverse the will of the people. Even coming off a big Hillary winning streak, few if any superdelegates will be inclined to do so. For politicians to upend what the voters have decided might be a tad, well, suicidal....
The Clintonites can spin to their heart's content about how Obama can't carry any large states besides Illinois. How he can't close the deal. How they've got the Big Mo now.
There's a report from Roger Simon at the Politico - someone who Joe says is a "real" reporter, i.e., he doesn't just report unsubstantiated rumors - that a senior Clinton campaign official told the reporter that they are planning on trying to take Obama's delegates that he won in the primaries.
What does this mean? Take Virginia. Obama beat Clinton 64% to 35%. That gave Obama 54 delegates to Clinton's 29 delegates. The Clinton campaign is reportedly going to try to convince those 54 Obama delegates not to support Obama at the convention, even though you voted for those delegates to support Obama. We're not talking superdelegates - we're talking the delegates you voted for in the various state primaries. We're talking your vote.
Clinton's campaign says the story isn't true. This means that Roger Simon needs to now give his side of the story. Having said that, the Clinton campaign has gone increasingly negative in the past few days - accusing Obama of plagiarism (when Hillary herself has adopted Obama's "change" theme), and they've accused Obama of skirting debates when he's already done 18 of them and agreed to 2 more in the next few weeks (it's not clear why the Obama campaign didn't counter-offer a series of debates about Iraq and Iran - that would have ended the discussion). That doesn't prove that this story is true, but this delegate-stealing story is the kind of news that is consistent with a campaign that is sounding increasingly worried and is resorting to increasingly nasty tactics.
And putting all that aside, how is it even possible that our rules permit this?
