Most paid pundits avoid making blanket predictions that can easily turn out to be wrong. Luckily, I'm not paid, so I am going to go out on a limb here and suggest that Hillary is now, and probably always has been, the inevitable Democratic candidate for the 2008 election. The important thing to keep in mind here is that all you need to get the Democratic nomination is 2,025 delegates and the system has been stacked in Hillary's favor from the beginning.
To begin with, let's look at what has happened with the early states and what is likely to happen between now and Feb 5th. For Obama to have had any chance of winning, he really needed to not just take IA but also two of these three: NH, NV, SC. Instead, it looks likely that he will have won IA and SC. This is impressive, but it is (sadly?) not enough.
Hillary is looking very solid in the next big state up - FL (even though these delegates *may* not get seated, it will have an impact on Feb 5 races and in all likelihood these delegates will get seated, just not until later). She also has very sizeable leads in CA and NY.
To have a realistic shot of winning from here, Obama would need to take 3 of those 4, and he's looking to lose all 4. Granted, polls can be wrong (see NH), but even without those polls there are clear signs of why Hillary is likely to win in these big states. She is turning out women in unbelievable numbers and they are voting overwhelmingly for her. Furthermore, Latinos, who make up large pieces of each of these electorates, are voting in even larger majorities for Hillary. So things are not looking good for Obama.
But the interesting part of this story is that the delegate counts for Hillary and Obama are likely to remain close, even after Feb 5, unless Hillary really just demolishes him. I suspect that after Feb 5th there will be no more than 200 delegates separating the two leaders (10% of the total needed to win). The really interesting part of this is that there are 800 Super Delegates who can decide to support any candidate they want. These delegates are not voted on, the primaries and caucuses do not determine who they will vote for, and in effect they make up 40% of what a candidate would need to clinch the nomination.
Who are these people? They are insiders to the Party . .folks like Al Gore, Jimmy Carter, et al. And, while many remain unpledged, those who have pledged have gone overwhelmingly for Hillary. 463 of the SDs have pledged their support to a candidate, with Hillary getting 200 to Obama's 110 (Edwards only has 32). That break is likely to get even more pronounced as Hillary's momentum picks up and these insiders who have been sitting on the sidelines decide to jump on what they perceive to be the winning horse. At this point I would say it's likely that Hillary maintains this 2-to-1 advantage over Obama, leaving her with 600 Super Delegates to Obama's 200.
How important is that advantage? Consider this: CA, NY and IL have a total delegate count of 900. Hillary and Obama are likely to split these pretty closely, so say one of them gets 400 and the other gets 500. That difference of 100, the result of millions of voters going to the polls, is overwhelmed by the Super Delegate advantage that Hillary has and will likely continue to have. The total delegates resulting from the Feb 5 Super Tuesday is 1688, so even if Obama miraculously won 60% of these delegates through voting, he would have won (on Feb 5th) 1012 delegates to her 676 - a difference of 336 . . .which is *still* 65 delegates less than her likely Super Delegate advantage.
There are some wild cards here of course. If Obama wins SC, IL and CA and comes close in NY (or even wins there), it's conceivable that the 400 unpledged Super Delegates might split their votes more in his favor. But even then she will likely squeak by with a delegate win. Edwards is also a wild card. He is likely to fold camp after he loses in SC and it's possible that he would endorse Obama. But even that wouldn't help Obama that much. Many Edwards supporters are the same demographic that like Hillary - generally poorer white people who think the economy is headed in the wrong direction. Further, I'm not sure Edwards would take the risk of openly angering the likely Dem nominee by supporting her rival. Another important wild card out there is Al Gore. He actually has a lot of influence (unlike someone like Kerry), and so far Gore has sat on the sidelines. I suspect he has done this because he's done the same calculations I just did above and realized long ago that Hillary was playing on a field slanted dramatically in her favor. There is no love lost between the Cintons and the Gores, but he isn't stupid and he isn't interested in needlessly alienating the likely nominee. He also probably learned his lesson after endorsing Howard Dean in 2004.
OK, now to the important part: Hillary still loses in head-to -head polls against McCain. She currently loses to McCain by 4 points (McCain is beating Obama by only 2 points), But she beats Guliani and Romney (by 6% and 12% respectively). Again, polls are far from accurate or reliable this early on, and they can't accurately predict things like differential turn-out (all the angry Rs that will vote just because they hate Hillary, or all the women voters who will vote just because they want a woman President), but in terms of trends, Hillary is moving in the right direction (several weeks ago she lost to all R candidates). And this has been true of all of her elections - the more the voters got to know her (in NY, NH, etc) the more her "unfavorables" went down.
So if you are someone who is only going to be happy with an Obama nomination, I'd say now is the time to start doing everything you can to make him win in CA and to start shaming leading Dems not to pledge their Super Delegate votes until after all the Primaries are finished. But truly, you may find your time better spent thinking of ways to encourage Hillary to commit to the policies and priorities you care about. And one thing that will hurt all of us is if Obama supporters, as they see the writing on the wall, begin to carp about how unfair and undemocratic the process is. We need to go into the General Election with a candidate that has a mandate to win. As one of my favorite philosophers said, "Don't hate the Player, hate the game." And if you don't like the way the nomination game is played, start working on fixing it in January of 2009.
The worst case scenario I see is that the nomination fight gets uglier (think more Bill and Obama fights) and Hillary comes out of the process even more wounded than she went in. McCain (or worse, Romney) gets the nomination for the Rs and then our favorite moderate billionaire Bloomberg decides to jump in the race and self fund a massive campaign whose likely outcome will be to siphon votes away from Hillary and give the Presidency to whoever wins the R nomination. While this is not a likely scenario, it is certainly very possible. And even if a Bloomberg type candidate doesn't jump in, to the extent that the Dem nominating process is ugly and contentious, that can only help the R candidate for the General.
One small PS - While this Super Delegate thing may seem undemocratic, and of course it is . . .just remember that it wasn't so long ago that a bunch of white men sat in a cigar filled room and chose the candidate by a show of hands. Today's system may not be perfect, but it's a lot better than the way it used to get played (although one could make an interesting argument that really there is just a veneer of democracy intended to obscure what is truly an elite decision-making proces).
A final PS - I know in my last blog I complained that pundits spent too much time on the horse race and not enough time on the issues. And here i go doing the same thing. But the fact is that there just isn't a lot of daylight between Hillary and Obama on the issues. You can debate who has better judgement, who will surround themselves with better people, who will likely govern better, etc . . .but the real debate on issues is likely to begin once we are in the General election.
Thanks for reading this and sharing your thoughts. And Happy Martin Luther King Day.
-Jesse
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