Anne E. Kornblut and Shailagh Murray commit an excellent act of journalism today, with their analysis of Super Tuesday strategies in the Washington Post. If you want to understand the rules of the game, you should read it.
Unlike the Republicans, the Democrats do not have winner take all primaries and caucuses. Rather, the delegates are selected by congressional district, with extra points added on for winning the popular vote. To give one example of the significance of these rules, look at New York state.
The [Obama] campaign is also tackling the No. 2 prize of New York [number one is California] by congressional district, seeking to capitalize on a rule that would grant Obama two-fifths of all delegates if he can hit the 31 percent mark in each district. “We don’t plan to win New York, but we do plan to take a lot of delegates out of there,” Hildebrand said. The Clinton team has the same approach in Illinois. That is why Clinton stopped in St. Louis en route from Las Vegas to New York after winning the Nevada caucuses last weekend, making an appearance that would be seen in crossover media markets in Illinois.
In other words, Obama can get 40% of New York’s delegates by reaching 31% in every congressional district. Clinton can make similar inroads in Illinois. For this reason, the candidates are not making simple decisions about whether to campaign in states they can win (say, Georgia, for Obama or Connecticut, for Clinton) but complicated decisions about which congressional districts that they can win (or do very well in), irrespective of the state outcome.
SALINAS, Calif., Jan. 22 — The next Democratic presidential nominating contest will take place in South Carolina on Saturday, but Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton has already turned her full attention to places such as this: delegate-rich pockets of states that will vote in a tidal wave of primaries two weeks from now.
By traveling to Salinas and picking up the endorsement of Cesar Chavez’s United Farm Workers, Clinton is trying to solidify her vote with California Hispanics. It’s a solid strategy. Obama is responding by focusing on San Francisco.
To catch the attention of voters who will cast their ballots early, the Obama campaign picked Arizona and California for the airing of its first round of Feb. 5 ads. San Francisco Bay area residents are among the most likely to vote early, and Obama’s California ad targets them by addressing his call for alternative energy sources, a major local concern. Obama scored a key Bay Area endorsement, from longtime Rep. George Miller, a close ally of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi.
Obama has another strategy, which I think is pretty smart, although it only involves 12% of the available delegates on February 5th.
The Obama campaign’s heavy emphasis on grass-roots organizing, which served it so well in Iowa, has led it to target the six states that will hold caucuses rather than primaries on Feb. 5. These are typically lightly attended affairs, but they could deliver big returns if Obama can follow his Iowa model of identifying a pool of supporters, including nontraditional participants such as college students and independents, and methodically turning them out.
The big three in that category are Colorado, Kansas and Minnesota. But the campaign also is active in North Dakota, where Obama has three offices; Alaska, where he has two; and Idaho, where he has one. To help balance out Clinton’s edge with Democratic Party faithful, Obama is seeking endorsements in all six of the caucus states and may be close to securing the nod of Kansas Gov. Kathleen Sebelius, sources close to the campaign said. (The Clinton team counters that the Feb. 5 caucus states are relatively unimportant, accounting for just 12 percent of the delegates who will be awarded that day.)
It’s important for Obama to win a lot of states on February 5th, particularly because he has an uphill climb to emerge with the most delegates on that day. It will help if he can win these six caucus states, in addition, hopefully, to Georgia, Alabama, Missouri, and Illinois. If he does that, while getting at least 40% of the delegates out of California and New York, he should still be in the game. The battle will then move to the Capitol region, as Virginia, Maryland, and the District of Columbia all vote on February 12th. Actually, to be totally accurate, there are some contests in between:
- February 9 – Louisiana, Nebraska caucus, Washington caucus, U.S. Virgin Islands caucus
February 10 – Maine caucus
Those are all caucuses, and if Obama continues to do well in caucuses, these contests could give him a little boost going into the contests on the 12th.
That’s the lay of the land, and one of the keys will be whether Edwards can get a decent share of delegates. If he does, no one will emerge from these contests with majority of the delegates and the fight could just keep going on and on.
