The Obama Juggernaut Illusion
By Kevin Holtsberry Posted in 2008 | 2008 Democratic Primary | 2008 Presidential Campaign | Barack Obama | Hillary Clinton — Comments (7) / Email this page » / Leave a comment »
As the media worships Obama tonight - on his way to clinching the Democratic nomination - it is worth keeping in mind that if it were not for the bizarre rules of the Democratic Primary process Obama would never have had a chance to win this thing. You don't have to be a Hillary shill - and I don't think anyone can accuse me of that - to recognize the simple fact that had the primary process been anywhere near winner take all Hillary wins.
Yes, Obama built a strong campaign organization. He raised a lot of money. And he did a better job of understanding the rules and organizing to win under those rules. But so much of his momentum was a result of the rules which prevented anyone from really winning. Hillary could beat him by hundreds of thousands of votes in critical state after critical state and gain little advantage. He was the underdog who just kept hanging around and eventually Hillary's own stupid mistakes proved fatal. That and his overwhelming support from African Americans was enough to push him over the top.
What the media seems unable to recognize is that Obama didn't decisively beat Hillary but rather eked out a slim lead and then convinced Democratic superdelegates to give him the nomination. But primaries are always about perception and Obama is the master of winning perception. His cool calm demeanor and his rhetorical skills have clearly won over the media. I think this and anti-Clinton sentiment made a huge difference. Democrats feel this is their year and they were willing to risk an inexperienced candidate because they wanted to put both the Clinton and the Bush years behind them. And they wanted a full-throated liberal even if he was untested.
The question is whether this makes Obama seem like a much stronger candidate than he really is at this point. If Hillary can beat him to the degree that she has what does that mean for the general election? If I was an Obama fan, I would be worried.
Look at his page. He has rounded up a collection of newspaper front pages throughout the world praising Obama's victory, including one from the liberal The Guardian in UK.
Whether it was Wright and/or pure ineptitude, the Obama campaign began to unravel after March and has never recovered. If the McCain campaign is capable, whatever caused the second half of the primary to trend Hillary needs to be identified and exploited.
Hillary won Texas but was awarded fewer delegates than Obama. I know they have that crazy dual system there but I didn't think there would be that much offset to the primary part from the caucusing part.
The thing is, though Hillary won the TX primary it was mad close. 51-47. That yielded a 4 delegate lead (considering delegates are alloted not porportionally but by a more complicated system that goes by district and such, the number of extra delegates a candidate gets doesn't go up linearly but lurches at certain thresholds, and this was too small a lead for that).
As for the media not recognizing that Obama eked out a victory, they have been parroting Hillary's talking point that she won the popular vote, even though that is misleading, as it only works out that way when you count Obama as having 0 votes from Michigan, and so is not really indicative of what party members want. Plus, opinion polls have shown Obama with a consistent and growing lead of Hillary for months. Recently it has expanded to 9 points.*
Finally, if there were no superdelegates Obama would have clinched awhile ago - the superdelegates have kept Hillary in the race, not Obama. Or to be more precise, the indecisiveness of some superdelegates. So it is not like he was the choice of the people in the smoke-filled room - he got more support, more votes, more delegates, and eventually the party elites caught up. Close, to be sure, but not decided by the elites.
*How that jives with the closer overall vote, consider this: Obama did well in caucus states. That is partly his advantage in caucuses with more enthiusiastic people, to be sure, but also because most caucus states are Western states, where Obama does well anyway. If a state like Colorado (which went 67% for Obama and is not even his highest level of support, he had multiple states >70%) had a primary, I would guess this would happen: the people who come to the primary who wouldn't go to caucuses support Obama, but by a lower margin than the caucus-goers. So Obama's percentage win would lower, but his numerical win (that is, how many more votes he got than Hillary) would go up. So, his strength in caucus states actually lowered his vote totals, as fewer people show up to caucuses.
(example: Kerry got 1 million votes in CO in 04, but only about 100,000 caucused there - only 10%. In contrast, in Tenessee (which I pick because you would expect a lower turnout, in a non-contested state which is nobody's home state) those numbers are 1 million and 600,000 - six times as many.)
If CO had a primary instead, and non-caucus primary-goers split at 55-45 for Obama, as opposed to the 67-33 split for caucus goers, then you would expect Colorado to get 500,000 additional votes, and you would expect Obama to pick up an extra 50,000 votes. That is one state, and a conservative estimate for his lead in the state overall among Dems. Add in Washington, all the smaller states (including Idaho with his 79% win), etc. and that is where the discrepancy comes from, at least in large part, I would guess.
What is the point of all that? None, just interesting I think...
Actually, no. Had all those caucus states had primaries, Obama's reduced margin of victory would have more than compensated for increased voter participating, resulting in LOWER numerical margins. Four states that conducted both primaries and caucuses showed exactly that same pattern; Obama wins the Washington caucus by (estimated) 90,000, but the primary by 40,000; in Nebraska, he won the caucus by 12,000, but the primary by 2,5000; in Idaho, he won the caucus by 13,000, but the primary by 7,000; and in Texas he won the caucus and LOST the primary. Granted, none except Texas were binding primaries, but each one had 2-3 times more voter participation than the corresponding BINDING caucus.
Then consider South Dakota. All the surrounding caucus states Obama won by landslide margins, yet he loses South Dakota in such a solid fashion? It's incomprehensible that South Dakota is just SO different than North Dakota or Nebraska.
That is true, but...first of all, wrt Texas, this is why I talked about Western states - I only mean that this is the case in the really heavy pro-Obama states, which TX is not. If, for example, you would posit the same boost from primary percent of vote to caucus percent of vote then you might expect this to happen in TX but something more favorable in some of the other Western states like Colorado. The advisory primaries I know little about, but it is possible that the Obama campaign simply did not try to do well there, and keep in mind that early on Obama always polled behind, almost everywhere, and had to campaign a lot to catch up. So early on if he did not try to get people to go to the advisory primary, did not do GOTV, etc, then he wouldn't do well there. My understanding is he also didn't try at all in South Dakota, whereas Clinton made like a million trips there.
An example of the opposite would be the Utah primary, which Obama won 57-39 for a 22k vote advantage.
Back in December Hillary was the unstoppable Terminator of Republican ambition. She was the smartest woman to walk the earth, the second coming of Bill but feminine, and inevitable winner of the general. Oops.
Not saying we can't delude ourselves, but mostly we go stoic when we march to our doom.
"Those who expect to reap the blessings of freedom must, like men, undergo the fatigue of supporting it."
-Thomas Paine: The American Crisis, No. 4, 1777