Well yesterday's "Super Tuesday Junior" didn't turn out the way we Obama supporters had hoped. He won Vermont handily but lost Ohio, Rhode Island and the Texas primary (the Texas caucus results haven't been determined yet). In fact, Obama's campaign hadn't expected to see wins in any of those 3 states and were happy to see that Clinton's 20 point lead of a few weeks ago had closed considerably.
Still, the momentum does feel like it now rests with Clinton, with exit polls showing that of the people who made up their minds in the 3 days prior to yesterday's contests, over 60% settled on her. My previous post mocked her "red telephone commercial" a bit and I thought people would see right through it. Sadly her fearmongering tactics seem to have actually worked. I was really turned off by her attitude yesterday after her wins, particularly when she stated that in order to win in November, the Democratic nominee has to be able to win big states like Ohio and Texas. This is a moot point in my opinion, as turnout in those states (as in many over the course of this primary season) was more than 2:1 in favor of the Democrats. CNN's Election Center for Ohio showed the breakdown of yesterday's results like this:
Clinton - 1,207,806
Obama - 979,025
McCain - 636,256
Huckabee - 325,581
Paul - 49,027
The sum of all 3 Republicans' votes is 1,010,864. Clinton beat them all combined by herself and Obama came within a couple percentage points of doing the same. However, total Democratic votes cast for the night was 2,186,831, more than DOUBLE the total Republican votes. It is fairly safe to assume that either Democratic nominee would be able to pull in those votes in the general election which would result in a landslide win for the Democrat. I believe Obama may be able to get even better results due to his appeal to Independents and Republicans. We obviously don't know if some Republicans chose not to come out for the primary since John McCain had all but sealed the nomination, yet I believe that the primary turnout gives a good indication of which way the votes will likely swing in November, regardless of who the nominee is. The results in Texas were much the same.
Despite Obama's losses last night, his lead in delegates stayed virtually the same. He leads in state contests won, popular vote and pledged delegates (those determined through primaries and caucuses). The only way Clinton can conceivably win at this point is to blow him out by 20+ percentage points in all the remaining contests AND convince the 400+ unpledged superdelegates to overturn the will of the electorate and support her. I don't see this happening, but you never know. I respect the fact that Obama wants to keep his campaign positive and focused on the issues, but the Clinton campaign's actions over the past week have me concerned. I fear that we are in store for an increasingly negative campaign over the next 3 months, especially since the "red phone commercial" did seem to serve its purpose. This is just bad news for the party as a whole, especially since John McCain is now the confirmed Republican nominee and can just sit back and take notes. I know Hillary wants to play up her national security credentials as opposed to Obama right now, but my husband summed it up nicely this morning when he wrote that "this approach strikes me as dangerously short-sighted; does she really want to get into a national security qualifications pissing match with John McCain of all people?" Indeed. Stay tuned.
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