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.
The 2/5 results should be very interesting, and the delegate count will tell us a lot going forward. Thanks for the pointer to the breakdown.
This contest could very well go down to the delegates at the convention, that is certainly the only meaningful way to score Feb. 5th. Obama’s campaign is doing a good job of targeting smaller states that will be important in maintaining a 50 state strategy in the general.
My prediction is that Obama will do very well in the small states, particularly Mountain West, and in Illinois. CA and NY will be hard for him, but he will do better there than the pundits predict. I think that Obama can win the primary if he can keep it close on Feb. 5.
I think he can win a brokered convention. Can he knock Clinton out completely? I don’t see how.
I don’t know about winning a brokered convention. The Clintons will twist arms to the breaking point to get what they want.
if the mountain states trend as l believe they will,obama’s got an up hill struggle. here in colorado, where he, at last count, has 7 field offices, he’s peaked and seeing a decline. edwards, l think, has a high probability of doing well here. granted, it’s just a small number of delegates, but l theink the prospects for a brokered convention are growing daily:
from square state:
click image to enlarge
in the spirit of full disclosure, l have a dog in this fight as l’ll be caucusing for edwards.
lTMF’sA
Ah, so Hillary stopped here because our media market hits southern Illinois. That makes some sense. Well, here’s my take on it.
I’m not sure she gained anything. She was three hours late BUT got to the rally just as the 10:00 news was starting (amazing how that happens isn’t it?). The campaign didn’t quite time it right though. They should have had the warmup acts finishing right when the news started so the local news could go live to Hillary speaking.
Instead they went live to … Bill. Doing the warmup. And she was standing behind him in a red suit smiling and nodding and … kind of looking like Nancy Reagan. They cut away from him after about a minute and never went back to her. I thought it was very ineffective. Especially considering that southern Illinois is Clinton-hating territory. I think she would have been better served looking like she was standing on her own if Southern Illinois was the goal.
She did some taped interviews though and they played one last night. She hit good economic points and sounded like she cared about the plight of the average worker. But (and I know this is going to sound shallow but I really don’t mean it this way)I think most people were probably more distracted as I was with how she looked. The lighting was terrible and it showed every line and wrinkle on her face. It was very unflattering and was such a contrast to how she looks in debates and commercials that it was hard not to think about it.
We’ve all spent our morning wondering who the Republicans are going to run for governor. Almost any candidate will be stronger than Blunt and will be able to run against the Democrat (Blunt had to run against his own record). So while it’s great that he’s gone, it could make the race tougher. Everyone agreed this was yet another reason not to want Hillary at the top of the ticket here.
This year Republicans are so broken up as a party that many would stay home… UNLESS they are going out to vote AGAINST the Clintons. Having Hillary on the ballot is probably more motivating to the Republicans than having a “Marriage Protection Amendment” is to the homophobes. At the same time, having Hillary at the top of the ticket is more likely to keep someone like me at home after losing interest in the process altogether. This means congress realigns and the Democrats lose seats to the Republicans.
Just what we need… Hillary as President, planning all of her programs in secret, battling it out with Republicans who would then either control or at least have vastly increased power in Congress. Whenever she does a speech to gain the support of the people, we change the channel or fall asleep because she does not inspire anyone but old white ladies.
What an awful scenario. And that’s if she manages to squeak out a 50+1 win in November, which is a long shot, considering the bridges she’s burning to win the primary.
God help us. Just as Obama would strengthen Democrats down-ticket, Clinton could REALLY harm them. Why isn’t this angle analyzed much? And are people even paying attention?
Breaking News: Brittney’s in family court now as we speak. Will she ever see her kids again? Let’s turn to to the celebrity personal crisis experts and get their take.
Hillary supporters (and some fairly neutral party people who are concerned that she WILL get the nod) try to suppress this discussion by saying that they are right wing talking points and can be used against her in the general.
But this is a primary — the pros and cons of each candidate should be examined.
We had a discussion yesterday among Democrats who were VERY concerned that Hillary gets the nomination and that Bill could be cheating on her right now. If that gets dumped into the news cycle right before the election what would happen? How would she respond? It would be an immense negative for her here in Missouri.
But you aren’t supposed to talk about this out loud because oh. my. god. these are right wing talking points. It’s also a rational thing to fear given his history. Every single person in the group wished something would come out on him NOW so we can see what Hillary’s response will be and evaluate it. But to say that somewhere other than in private is frowned upon by the party and of course by Hillary supporters.
Good grief. This is not a normal election – we have the wife of a President running. That’s odd enough. We have a wife of an impeached President running. Makes it even odder. We have the wife of a President who was impeached because the conservative movement USED his infidelity and lying to create a case for impeachment that what bogus. And we shouldn’t take that into account? Because if we do we’re playing right wing politics? The whole thing is crazy.
You might not be alone. I just read this letter from a woman in California over at Ben Smith’s Politico blog…
Maybe there is hope after all. Are women coming around? We shall see.
The blogosphere is the only place where we can hope to find this kind of analysis.
This is one of my biggest fears of Hillary as the eventual candidate. A net loss nationally for Dems, including losing the Senate, but Hillary in the White House. This would most certainly result in a total paralysis on any changes we could hope to get legislatively. Most certainly a continuation of the Bush doctrine in Iraq and no hope of ever breaking the corporate hold on the entirety of our government. There might be a short term change in rhetoric at the start but the end result would be a business as usual.
The thought of this really, really depresses me. Mainly because it seems like a plausible scenario if she is the candidate. We have not yet even touched the tip of the iceberg on how low this thing could go if she somehow surges ahead and appears to be inevitable.