Sometimes the conventional wisdom is so incorrect it’s not funny. In the runup to the primary season the consensus opinion was that the Republican side could go all the way to the convention as Mitt Romney and Rudy Giuliani were thought to be the party standardbearers, with Fred Thompson having an outside chance. John McCain was a walking dead man in the campaign. Meanwhile, this was the coronation walk for Hillary Clinton and she’d have things pretty much in hand after Super Tuesday.
We all know what happened next. On the GOP side, Iowa brought a shocking victory for Mike Huckabee but then John McCain ran off a string of victories in New Hampshire, South Carolina, and finally Florida. The Sunshine State win dashed Rudy Giuliani’s hopes, and despite a series of caucus victories out west combined with wins in Massachusetts and Michigan, Mitt Romney ceded the nomination after Super Tuesday. Only Mike Huckabee and longshot Ron Paul remain in the GOP race, but unless something unthinkable happens John McCain will have come back from the political death predicted after the amnesty bill failed to seize his party’s nod for November.
The voters on the Democratic side have also confounded the standard prediction of Hillary Clinton waltzing to the nomination. Sure, she was stunned in Iowa by Barack Obama but her side claimed they didn’t really campaign out there until late in the game, and all seemed right with the world after the Clinton win in New Hampshire. Surely things would now return to the track of another two for one deal in the White House.
However, something happened on the way to the station for Hillary Clinton and now her back is against the wall. There are two theories as to why this is happening.
The first theory has to do with the race card. Bill Clinton went all over South Carolina lowering expectations for Hillary by noting the black vote would go to Obama, so if she didn’t win there it was because the black voters wouldn’t pull the lever for a white woman while a black man was in the race. This pitting of race on race proved to assure that states would split on more or less racial lines for Super Tuesday but may have cost Hillary dearly in the February 12 primaries. Maryland and Virginia may have gone Hillary’s way had those remarks not been made, but the minority vote fell in behind Barack Obama in a huge way after Bill’s statements.
But to me the more plausible theory comes from organization. Because Hillary thought she had a pretty clear path to the nomination her campaign strategy neglected a number of caucus states, particularly those in the Midwest and Rocky Mountain region. While there’s not as many delegates per state out there in the hinterlands as in the delegate-rich states Hillary has won such as California and New York, picking up 2 or 3 caucus states neutralizes the effect Hillary had in winning the bigger prizes. And the Democrat rules about proportionally giving out delegates (instead of several winner-take-all states like the GOP has) enabled Barack Obama to hang in the race until the Chesapeake primaries, a point where he took control of the nomination by winning three states and maintaining a streak of victories that’s now reached double digits.
Thus, the March 4 primary states of Ohio and Texas (with Vermont and Rhode Island playing supporting roles) appear to be the final chance for Hillary Clinton to get back the coronation she was likely expecting to happen a month ago. (If memory serves me correctly, the first week of March was Super Tuesday in the last election cycle. It’s amazing how far back the process has jumped.) You have to wonder when she’ll throw in the towel if she loses the two biggest prizes left on the docket (with apologies to our friends to the north in Pennsylvania) simply because it’ll dry up a lot of her donor base if she’s not perceived to have a chance. I know, never count the Clintons out.
And her argument to the superdelegates that would decide the nomination would be one where she has carried fewer states, but thus far she’s carried more of the “blue” 2004 states that she would be likely to win (worth 134 electoral votes) than Obama has (worth 83 electoral votes.) Much of Obama’s delegate strength, she could argue, comes from a number of states the Democrats stand little chance of taking.
It’ll be interesting to see what happens to be sure, but I feel that unless Barack Obama wins in both Texas and Ohio Hillary Clinton will stay in. All I have to say is let ’em fight it out.
