Clinton lost almost every county in Nevada but she won in Clark County by a big margin and that is where most of the people live. She is going to win the caucuses with somewhere around 49%-52% of the vote. Edwards will finish with an astonishingly low 4% of the vote. Both outcomes are deadly to the prospects for stopping a Clinton nomination. I think Obama’s victory in South Carolina is now at risk, particularly if Edwards’ supporters start shifting to the other white candidate. I’m ‘this’ close to calling the nomination as over. But dynamics can still change in a hurry and perhaps an Obama comeback in South Carolina can still propel him to victories on Feb. 5th. I think Obama’s chances are about 20%. There is no accounting for people’s tastes.
About The Author
BooMan
Martin Longman a contributing editor at the Washington Monthly. He is also the founder of Booman Tribune and Progress Pond. He has a degree in philosophy from Western Michigan University.
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here comes Bloomberg!
This may indeed be the nail in the coffin. But really, the body was already placed in the coffin and the first few nails were firmly in place when it became a race between Obama, Clinton, and Edwards. I’ve tuned out from the nomination process because I’ve been resigned to the Democrats electing a right-leaning corporatist that is not up to the historic challenge of our times. These last few years have been a great opportunity to move our nation to the left. We have now squandered that opportunity because the Democratic party is filled with weak-kneed defeatists that don’t have the courage of their own convictions and don’t bother standing up for liberal ideas.
For the life of me I don’t understand how progressives have gotten themselves involved in the silly debate about the subtle differences between the three leading candidate.
Progressives should haven avoided the silly fight about the silly differences between these three candidates and stuck to the issues and moved the party to the left. That opportunity is now wasted as Hillary will now tack to the right and not even bother with us pesky lefties anymore. So sad.
Too many took the bait and now we lost our voice.
What he said…I couldn’t have said better myself.
Subtle differences? You mean that there are NO Democrats running this time around?
This is the look of Clintonism, Republican Lite, and further Neocon foreign policy: smugness.
Yes, and it’s going to take a while for me to get used to this new reality. I don’t know what is going to be worse, the Republican attack machine or Hillary’s smug mug.
i’l call it for you. game over. clinton is the dem candidate for the GE. the gop base is getting rev’d up as i type. ads are being produced by the RNC — who BTW are going to bring us all the hatred and division you can possibly imagine–and we will get to watch a rerun of of the last 2 elections plus the hateful repeated sex-politics of the 90’s. only this time, the right wing conspirators will not leave her, or Bill, standing.
A get ready for right-leaning Democrats to demand that you support Hillary–not because Hillary addresses your concerns, but because the Republicans are being mean to her. We are guaranteed to have an election fight over personality issues, not the real issues.
If you care about liberal ideas and the future of the Democratic party you will find a “third way” from the two horrible choices we face in November. Liberal ideas are far more important than Hillary or the Democratic party.
Ugh, Nothing will energize the Republicans like HRC winning the nomination. Trust me, it will be the dirtiest, ugliest campaign ever.
Stooleo
There were way more women than men (58/42) and she took the majority of the women. Men are much less likely to vote for her. She got a minority of the male vote – 43 % or so.
Entrance polls for Hillary are exact, but Obama outperformed his. He took ALL the JRE attendees.
So, the question for JRE voters: Is President Clinton good with you? Because that’s what’s coming.
And can she win in the GE? She has the female D vote, locked. She has 45 % of the male D vote. That adds to 33 % of the GE vote.
She needs a plurality. Where does it come from? She gets more male D for sure – I give her up to 70 % of the male D vote. At that point, she is at 40 % in the GE.
Where’s the rest come from?
It sounds odd to say that Obama needs to turn out more male voters – but based on the high turnout of women in NH and Nevada … it appears that’s what he needs to do.
If it’s to be an alternative to Hillary, we need to turn out the men.
Female turnout on a Saturday was a given. It’s not just turning out the men, so-called progressives are actually going to have to GOTV in black and brown neighborhoods. Will it happen? I mean before Feb. 4th?
Latino voters went for Hillary in Nevada. 64-24. They were 14% of the total vote. So turning out more of the Latino vote – it isn’t clear that would have been a help to him.
Now, as Man Eegee has explained to me in detail at his blog, you can’t group “Latinos” into one grouping and extrapolate results across the country. So who knows?
Turning out the black vote, though, should help him immensely. They were only 16% of the vote here -but he got 79% of it.
Man Egee is right, you can’t guarantee Latinos as a sure thing. Here in LA, there are entire enclaves of Latino Republicans. They won’t vote for a Democrat to save their lives. Then there are are hardcore Latino voters. But, my point still remains…will the so-called progressives actually do GOTV in these neighborhoods. Let’s look at it this way. I live in a Latino neighborhood. Very Democratic. Unfortunately, our Congresswoman has endorsed the Clintons for a 3rd term and our idiot, adulterous mayor is traveling with Team Clinton. While people here think Villaraigosa is a joke, Solis has some clout.
Now. I can drive 5 minutes away to South Pasadena and see lawns filled with Obama signs. There are a lot of Obama meetups in So. Pas. Here in my neighborhood there is one Obama group. I strongly believe the one guy who went to the GOTV training for the Obama campaign is an idiot, so the group has asked for help. Nothing. I contacted three of the Obama groups in So. Pas. on behalf of this local Obama group and nothing.
So, I wonder…will they ever come and help and if they do, will they do it before Feb. 4th?
Democrats are notorious at ignoring blacks and Latinos until a few days before a vote is needed. I read and hear about the Obama campaign’s awesome GOTV machine, but I have to drive to a white neighborhood to witness it.
If you had stepped into Obama’s headquarters, you’d realize that volunteers come in all colors, so do the voters they target.
My post was about actual GOTV in my area by the Obama campaign. As I said, there is already an Obama group here (all Latinos), but they need help with GOTV. The campaign isn’t helping them, so they had me appeal to people I knew, the three who run successful GOTV efforts in a rather small city.
And I’ll repeat myself, will they finally do a big GOTV before Feb. 4th?
I worry about Obama’s ground game and organization. California is critical for him. He doesn’t come close in California (and win the other states he’s expected to) it’s all over for him.
Wasn’t there a high profile endorsement of him in the LA Latino community the other day – a woman and I can’t think of her name but I think she was with a union? People said that was good but I don’t know California politics.
I still say he needs to run more progressive. Targeting groups by race or ethnicity or gender – I think it’s an ultimate loser if you don’t appeal to those voters at the level of values they share with you.
He just got two progressive endorsements – Leahy, and the Courage Campaign’s online vote. Obama passed Edwards in the final days to win that decisively.
Re Obama’s campaign, I’ve been in HQ a couple of times, and it looks like the other HQ I’ve been in. Messy, busy, smelly. 😉 They have a great online organizing too here in CA. But the same tool is available to all Democratic candidates, so that’s not a competitive advantage.
Dang. I was really hoping for an Obama win. It was going to motivate me to make all the calls I need to make. Now I need to chill a bit before I call. Rejection will be doubly depressing right now!
I probably wasn’t clear on my question. I thought she was with a union and wondered if that would help on the ground organizing. Will it give him on the ground help?
He’s got a large campaign organization in CA. In some ways, they seem very well organized. In others, not so much. I expect that will change intensely after South Carolina.
No campaign except the establishment candidate (i.e., Clinton) EVER has the ability to campaign in all states at once to a large degree. I’ve served on the staff of two presidential campaigns, and the elements were the same in both cases.
They focus most of their energy on the earliest states – probably 80% in Iowa and New Hampshire to 20% in all other states, because if they don’t get momentum going early, they can’t win. After Iowa and New Hampshire, if they’ve won or made a strong showing, they get a big influx of capital and then all the so far volunteer orgs in other states start getting some paid operatives.
The compressed schedule this year benefits Clinton over Obama, I fear, because he literally doesn’t have the time to campaign in all the Feb 5th states and her name recognition is higher.
And sadly, the anti-Obama whisperings – that he’s a practicing Muslim, etc. are gaining traction, even though they are UTTERLY false.
And what about Congresswoman Linda Sanchez’s endorsement of Obama? Does that carry any weight in the Latino community where you live?
I don’t think Fabooj is talking about weight, she’s talking about down on the ground get out the vote efforts. Making people commit to walking out their front door on election day and voting for your guy. Someone willing to put up a yard sign is more likely to vote on election day. Someone living on a street full of yard signs feels social pressure to go vote, or at the minimum feels that it would be “the thing to do” to go vote. You need people doing literature drops and phone banking targeting a specific group of streets. You need people organizing rides to the polls on election day. You need people organizing an absentee ballot drive for those unable to make it to the polls.
That’s what you need to see. She can speak for herself but what I hear is that kind of organizing effort has begun not too far from her in a white neighborhood but not in the latino neighborhood.
You can’t do that kind of stuff at the last minute. They should have started weeks ago.
In my old neighborhood (upper income, white, Jewish, and gay), you can see the lack of GOTV in the apt. bldg. areas. The the only candidate that ever had GOTV there the 8 years I lived there was Barbara Boxer. Meanwhile, if you just walked across the major street or a few blocks away to where the houses are, you saw people doing GOTV all the time.
I’ve always help out in black communities. Take 2004 for example, from what I heard trying to get help from the Kerry campaign was like pulling teeth. A request was sent to the volunteer coordinators and the campaign for more help, more stuff, more everything. They didn’t release any info until about 3 days before the election. Two days before the election about 12 white people did door knocking in the area for an hour. That was something that the group I worked with had been trying to organize from the beginning as none of them had experience door knocking.
The GOTV is in the initial stages. People are still calling to ID voters.
There are limited supplies in terms of lawn signs. Almost none at the Los Angeles HQ, in fact. Most people are told to order from the Web, but the vendor put out a note saying after Iowa, they had so many orders they were running 2-3 weeks behind. So if you ordered lawn signs now, there’s no guarantee you’d have them by the election. (Someone should help them prioritize big delegate-rich state orders!)
Different areas have more committed volunteers and less commmitted volunteers. If you want to help, please go on in to the campaign office – they surely need it.
Ironically (I hope ONLY ironically), the headquarters is RIGHT across the street from the now demolished Ambassador Hotel where Robert Kennedy was shot.
I don’t even want to think about the lawn sign fiasco. Like I said, I don’t think the Obama group over here is less committed, it’s just that they really need help to organize. Ironically, I got a call from one of the Hillary people in So. Pas. who saw my post and she said she’ll help the Obama people, teach them stuff. I thought that was nice of her.
They’re from down south. The southern Latinos are more Republican. Even though Linda is “more liberal” than her sister, it seems a lot of people up here think of them both as opportunist.
On the flip, if you go over the hill, Sanchez is pretty well regarded. But like I said, we’re talking about my side of the hill. If I loosely base my observances the past few weeks on the very few yard signs I’m seeing, the Latinos on the other side of the hill seem to be grouped by economic/education. The poorer and less educated area, they go GOP. The ones that live up in the hills where there are more white and Asian households have Clinton signs and the ones that live in the hipsterhoods have Obama or Kucinich signs, but those also seem to be mixed race households like mine.
And that makes sense. The less educated they are (which is often related to how poor they are), the more persuaded they are by simplistic arguments and Faux news type shows. That’s so sad, though.
I have said for years that the reason Republicans consistently underfund the school system in California is that ignorance breeds republicans, and that’s their goal. It also breeds low-wage workers, another goal.
Conspiracy? Or reality. “You decide.”
Bill can get as angry as he wants, twist as many arms as he can. Hillary will not win the general election.
The RNC Hillary spendometer is up and ready. But they’ll start with the Ts: Truth and Trust
Here’s their rapid response to her Nevada win:
It’s the year of the Independents. Watch that other guy from NYC. Nevada just focused his mind.
There there.
Bill can still lose it for her.
Except for the dirtiest, ugliest campaign they would have waged against Obama…
But that’s a fight I’d want to have, because that’s one that would cut the attacker more than the victim.
There is no accounting for people’s tastes.
True dat.
Source
I think Obama is going to win big in South Carolina, and that he’ll win some of the Feb 5 states as well.
Here’s why, re South Carolina.
And once he has two wins under his belt, I think others will swing back to him.
He made some serious missteps lately – notably his comment about Reagan. But we’ll see. Clinton may end up attacking him so hard the knife turns back on herself. We’ll see.
In Nevada, Reid’s son came through for Hillary.
I agree Obama will win SC and other states as well but with what’s ahead – financial disaster – I do not wish the presidency for Obama.
not to worry. the Clintons will not return to the White House. Events will change every plan.
Watch Wall Street and Bloomberg.
I am not ceding One. Damned. Thing.
I’m going to South Carolina. I don’t know when. I don’t know how. It may be for a couple of days, or just one. But by God, I’m going.
I may wait it out until super duper Tuesday, but then if this holds, I’m done with it. No more watching talking heads, no more reading political blogs. I can’t have an entire year of depression and frustration. Wake me up in January after Clinton or McCain’s inauguration.
McCain is not going to win, and if you bury your head you could get much worse.
Not so sure about McCain – he’s their best shot in the GE, maybe tonight in SC is the start.
Addicts always say that … “after such and such, I’m done” 🙂
You’ll still be here.
Are you really in Rolla? (I’m in St. Louis.)
Yeah, I am addicted. Just venting. And yeah, I’ve been in Rolla about 7 years (it’s the “Middle of Everywhere” you know).
well, the home of mini-stonehenge at least 🙂
No, if Clinton is the nominee I will not be able to stand listening to or reading about her.
I have no remaining tolerance for people telling me to vote for a Rovian Republican lite because ‘I have no other choice’.
The Republicans have won the presidency in the last eight years because the Republicans have learned how to game the vote.
Until we learn that it will take ALL of us working together to safeguard our vote, you can expect more of the same.
Ugh. Just ugh.
I’d like to remind people that we’ve never done anything like this before, and we’ve never done any Super Tuesday in an environment where there are so many opportunities to punch holes in the Mass Media information dam.
Look for Senator Clinton to try to deliver the Knockout Punch to Obama on February 5th, in California, for Obama to throw everything at blocking it at least, reversing it at best, and Edwards to take advantage of the California shitstorm to generate surprising results in flyover country.
Let’s all just take a deep breath, now, shall we?
http://balkin.blogspot.com/2008/01/who-won-democratic-nevada-caucus-who.html
Is it really over, if Obama left with more delegates than Hillary. I really doubt I could vote for her.
If it’s close by convention time, John Edwards could play “king or queen maker.”