The following graph represents the states that Obama won (purple) and the states that Hillary Clinton won (gold) in the 2008 primaries and caucuses. This is actually just the popular vote, but with the exception of Texas (I think), the popular vote reflected who got the most delegates.
Now, whipping out my handy-dandy 2016 primary calendar, I see that the first big date after the introductory phase (Iowa, New Hampshire, South Carolina, and Nevada) is Tuesday, March 1st, or Super Tuesday. Let’s take a look at who won each contest in 2008.
Alabama- Obama
Arkansas- Clinton
Colorado caucuses- Obama
Georgia- Obama
Massachusetts- Clinton
Minnesota caucuses- Obama
North Carolina- Obama
Oklahoma- Clinton
Tennessee- Clinton
Texas- Split (Obama got more delegates)
Vermont- Obama
Virginia- Obama
As we should have learned the last time around, what matters isn’t so much how many delegates a state has as how many delegates you can net out of a state. The best example of this came on Super Tuesday in 2008 when Obama was shellacked in New Jersey (107 delegates) and won in Idaho (18 delegates). The result? Obama netted 12 votes out of Idaho (15-3) and Clinton netted eleven votes out of New Jersey (59-48). New Jersey was supposed to be one of the big prizes that day, but Obama more than wiped out Clinton’s advantage by completely dominating in Boise.
If the primary season ever goes beyond a beauty contest and a battle for favorable media coverage and gets down to the nuts and bolts of actually winning delegates, these kinds of things will matter a lot. And we know that the Clinton campaign will be prepared this time around.
Now, Bernie Sanders is impressing me with the size of his rallies. Last night, he drew almost 28,000 people to a rally in Los Angeles. But he’s got to translate the support he’s able to get in places like L.A., Portland, Seattle, and Madison into places that are actually on the early primary calendar.
If he wants to flex his muscles and organize in liberal strongholds, I’d advise him to start doing so in states that are going to matter. Go to Minneapolis, Austin, Boulder, Asheville, Athens, Cambridge, and the NoVa suburbs. Get people organized there, now, so that you can spread out to less liberal areas of these states later.
You can also see from looking at that map why Sanders is getting badgered about his need to win over the black vote. Obama did well out West in states like Wyoming and Idaho, but his strength in southern states with large black populations was critical.
On the other hand, Sanders wants to push an economic message that should appeal to the white working class. And the white working class vote is strongest in the Appalachian belt stretching from the ‘T’ of Pennsylvania down to where the Appalachians give way to the Ozarks and the traditional home base of the Clintons. Sanders may not be able to hold places like Alabama and Georgia for the anti-Clinton camp, and he may not be able to win in places like Tennessee or Kentucky. But he doesn’t have to win all these states necessarily if he can hold down how many delegates Clinton nets out of them.
In 2008, Clinton netted twelves votes each out of Tennessee, West Virginia, and Pennsylvania, and 23 votes out of Kentucky. Outside of Massachusetts, New York and California, these were her strongholds. Sanders doesn’t have to take them away completely, but the stronger he runs there, the better.
Obama wasn’t able to win in Ohio, but he limited Clinton’s take to seven delegates. He didn’t win in Indiana but he held her gain to four delegates and organized the state well enough to pull off a surprise win against McCain in the fall.
There’s no way that Bernie Sanders will ever run away with the nomination and he will not catch Team Clinton flat-footed on caucus and primary strategy the way that Team Obama did. To win, he’ll need to grind it out, delegate by delegate. And, short of a big scandal or health problem in the Clinton Camp, Sanders will never get the superdelegate advantage that Obama enjoyed.
For these reasons, the Sanders campaign would be a longshot even if he were not such an out-of-the-mainstream character. But, he and his supporters want to give this an honest shot. And they should be at least as focused on the mechanics of this as the Obama campaign was or they’ll have absolutely no hope.
So, let’s see Sanders pack some stadiums at the universities of Tennessee and Georgia and Texas and Alabama. And it’s nice to rock Portland and Los Angeles, but he needs to turn his attention soon to the states whose votes are going to matter early on.
Love me some Bernie….been a fan since the bread&puppet days.
Still and all, team H will crush all comers once she gets the Big Dog on the road with her.
I’m ok with that.
Not so sure. 100,000 people cheering him over the weekend, and while yesterday Booman told us that there aren’t many delegates in the Pacific Northwest, what about California?
And Sanders talked a lot about racial injustice, just like he has since 1962. I hope Booman isn’t concern-trolling Sanders (this is the second article in two days that sounds like it) because maybe reporting on what he’s saying and the crowds he’s drawing might actually help to define this race. More so than concern trolling.
There is a lot of work ahead for Bernie supporters in order to (1) win the nomination, (2) win the Presidency, and (3) win a working majority in Congress and state legislatures.
Pointing out the immensity of the task ahead is not concern trolling.
A Presidential race doesn’t get won by sitting at rallies and cheering and applauding.
The defensiveness of Bernie’s supporters is instructive and to be frank not an encouraging sign. Typical for primary seasons but not encouraging for seeing a long shot candidate actually win. Especially when it is going to take a substantial transformation in political culture for that victory to take place.
What defines the race are the votes at the Iowa caucus, the New Hampshire primary, and SuperTuesday. It’s how many of those cheering crowds actually show up at a caucus or a primary to vote. And how many additional people they convince to vote with them.
Time to get over the enthrallment and get down to work in the northwest because it comes later in the primary schedule. If Bernie is going to win, the liberal strongholds are not going to get the Bernie attention because the primary schedule requires the candidate to be elsewhere. And if it gets close, the Pacific states will need to have their voters to the polls with late attention from Bernie.
It’s how quickly those large crowd numbers become equal sized corps of volunteers doing the ground work for the primary, caucus, or convention that matters on the Pacific coast. And the extent to which they can extend the map locally into areas of new Democratic voters that Clinton might not attract.
Absent the big rallies in large and/or liberal population areas there is no Sanders’ campaign. This is absolutely critical at this stage.
The purpose is to capture the enthusiasm of a sector of the US population that is taken for granted by the DEM Party that continues to offer them neoliberalcon candidates that they don’t like or want and accept the alternative of a dirtbag GOP. (This was the original base of the Obama campaign because he managed not to be identified as a neoliberalcon.) That enthusiasm does translate into tangible achievements:
None of that enthusiasm for Sanders will directly flow into Iowa. And in a two-person contest, with one of the candidates being DC/DNC approved, Iowa is an even bigger nut to crack than if there are three or more candidates. If his team hasn’t drilled down on what worked and didn’t work for Dean/Edwards/Obama and isn’t already putting a reformulated version on the ground, he doesn’t have a chance. The Gore/Kerry/Clinton strategy wins.
Like it or not, the team Obama strategy of working the caucus states beyond Iowa would have been weak tea had he not won Iowa and threatened to win NH. The latter put team Clinton so much on defense that she needed a win in NH at any cost. A price they chose to pay and concede the high AA population states. It only ended up being a losing strategy because they were oblivious of the “weak tea.” The “price” they paid could also have bit hard in the general election, but the Clintons have always depended on AA voters to “come home” in the general regardless of how many times they throw them under the bus. Hence, all this “Sanders doesn’t connect with the AA community” is coming directly out of Clinton central.
Sanders is a better wholesale messenger to the “Democratic wing” of the Democratic Party than has been seen since probably FDR. He’s also old. If Clinton were now even four years younger than she is, Sanders either wouldn’t be in the race or wouldn’t be considered a plausible candidate. But as we know, the nomination through Super Tuesday is mostly won at the “retail” level. He really does have to do extremely well in IA (at least a very close second) because unless he blows Clinton out of the water in NH, that primary will be discounted as a “favorite son” result.
The difficulty that Bernie has (and Clinton given the state slippage since 1994) is that SuperTuesday is going to be highly retail politics across a lot of territory. Bernie needs to meet people beyond rallies to get the social network effect. Hillary needs to re-establish relationships that existed 24 years ago.
And they have to have the 12 SuperTuesday states in the chute by October or November, while they are working full-out on Iowa and New Hampshire, South Carolina, and Nevada.
Then 5 states the next week
Then 6 states the next week
Then the biggies: New York, Pennsylvania, New Jersey, California
If Bernie’s strategy (whatever it is) works, California or Washington DC will put him over the top.
Being able to have enough momentum to have the locals work on the later large-delegate states frees him to work on the early “retail” large-delegate states.
A victory in South Carolina erases the “favorite son” discount of NH momentum. The Clintons blew South Carolina in 2008; some black South Carolinians haven’t forgotten but they are not going to automatically turn to Bernie either.
I cannot overstate that if Bernie’s campaign makes sense at all, it changes the conventional wisdom about campaigning. And more especially about the ideological limits of the American electorate.
Don’t disagree, but do think you’re underestimating the momentum factor and your “hurry up” schedule differs from mine.
Looking back at the 2008 SC polling it’s odd that Edwards thought he was competitive there. (Would be interesting to know what his 2004 win was based on — region, message, and/or “not Kerry.” 10% for Sharpton’s campaign run out of some luxury hotel with no staff wasn’t shabby. Nor was Clark’s faux campaign result of 7% bad.) However, Clinton led throughout 2007 with Obama only occasionally nipping at her heels.
But honestly, unless SC voters haven’t forgotten and/or forgiven what Clinton did in 2008 and all the subsequent anti-Obama digs, Sanders has no chance in SC — regardless of how early he gets in there and how many assets are dumped in.* Plus he can’t afford Rev. Al.
Sanders field team in NH needs to be in place by the beginning of Sept and by the end in Iowa and NV. Agree that Oct and Nov “in the chute” for the next twelve (tentatively) states. (Eleven if we exclude VT which shouldn’t require much care and feeing.) But he has to work all of them hard through the end of the year — including big rallies where possible in all of them (including SC b/c nobody likes to feel left out).
NH needs to be enough “in the bag” by December that it doesn’t need the “working full out” in Dec/Jan. The week between IA and NH should suffice* (even for prickly NH residents). IA, NV and the other SuperTuesday states will require “full out” in December and January.
*Allow me to rephrase what I think you’re seeing in the primary schedule map. “Hub and spoke.”
Vermont – hub; NH and MA spokes
IA – hub; MN and NB spokes (caucus)
NC – hub; SC and VA spokes
GA – hub; AL and FL spoke
TN – hub; AR, LA, and MS spoke
TX – hub; OK spoke
CO – bub – caucus team
MN – hub – caucus team
etc.
Might have to go back and look at Sander’s 6/30 FEC filing b/c thinking sequentially instead of hub/spoke some of his early ground hires didn’t seem optimal to me.
While Booman states that Bernie is an “out-of-the-mainstream character” his policies are very, very Main Street and that’s what’s working.
I’ll judge “working” when he gets to the Main Streets of South Carolina. A working families fusion constituency has to prove it can pull off the fusion. Democrats used to be that working families fusion ticket across ideology.
What is “out-of-the-mainstream” about Bernie is that he’s the first openly socialist candidate to run as a major party candidate. Someone should check this, but maybe ever. If Bernie mainstreams the “S” word, he moves into the mainstream. If it continues to stigmatize him, he doesn’t make it through the primaries. McCaskill is already beginning the mudslinging. And Missouri is where Sanders needs a full slate of candidates running with him to disrupt the Democratic establishment.
The Main Streets of Madison, Portland, and even Phoenix and Los Angeles are not sufficient to move him through to 75 million voters.
If the 2008 map splits into three groups.
Michigan 2008 has to be tossed out because the primary was flawed. Obama wasn’t even on the ballot.
The nine states with the largest AA population all went for Obama. Among the eleven lowest, only NH and SD went for Clinton.
A factor in AZ, CA, NV, NM and TX (and possibly FL) was the Latino vote. How that will shake out this time remains to be seen. If that doesn’t change by much and the AA vote goes as overwhelming for Clinton as it did for Obama, Sanders doesn’t have much of a chance.
Also, remember that FL was in the same boat as MI. Although Obama was on the ballot in FL no one campaigned there and it was early so name recognition was a big factor
Thanks — as I typed my comment, I had some vague sense that I was missing something about FL 2008, but what it was didn’t pop out for me as MI did.
Don’t know if the results would have been different in FL had they held a regular and non-controversial primary.
Hmm, certainly good advice. But I am not sure that Clinton is going to have a much improved operstion. She’s still using some historic clintonites and we know those folks have zero skills at party bullding, and once again she was expecting no real challenge for the nom. Not saying that Sanders is a real challenge yet.
Is she really using the same staffers / advisers as usual? Is there a list someplace?
That’s pretty worrysome if so — I worry less about her and more about those around her. The team she had in 2008 was a pretty terrible bunch on so many levels.
Nope, she picked up many of Obama’s team for this run, including Obama’s primaries wizard. See Zizi’s comment in this thread.
And crucially, no Mark Penn. That woman with the 3 names who ran operations, disastrously in a financial sense, in IA, she’s also not on the team.
http://www.p2016.org/clinton/clintonorg.html
A list. Michelle Kwan is an outreach coordinator in her post figure skating career.
Thx for info. Had no idea about Michelle Kwan. A little surprised Ann Lewis is not on the list.
100,000 turned out over the weekend for Bernie. When he gets to MN catch him.
Some correction Booman: Clinton also won the popular vote in Nevada but lost the delegate count. Prez Obama’s secret weapon was Jeff Berman, the caucus/delegate math whiz who knew every inch of the byzantine delegate allotment procedures. He got the Obama campaign to focus on odd-numbered delegate districts, where they could net outsize advantage compared to even numbered delegate districts.
Interestingly, Hillary has hired Berman this time around. She does not want to be caught flat-footed again.
Fighting the last war?
No, Obama’s secret weapon was Mark Penn.
Kidding.
But seriously, Hillary’s oversight of this basic part of governing is extremely disturbing. Hopefully she learned a ton from her errors. You don’t trust the fast-talking shister. As – I hope – Bill learned from his mountain of mistakes (Morris, Lieberman, etc.).
So, let’s see Sanders pack some stadiums at the universities of Tennessee and Georgia and Texas and Alabama.
We shall see. How do you know he doesn’t have plans already? Would you be advertising them if you were him? Do you follow Zaid on Twitter? He’s certainly working to get Bernie to Georgia. My guess is that this is only the tip of the iceberg. There will be events in the places you suggest at some point. What matters is also the message. And not a lot of people I see on Twitter are actually paying attention to it.
Seeing as how we are six months before SuperTuesday, over a year before showtime, 15 months before the election, and 17 months before inauguration, I hope that this is the tip of the iceberg.
The critical message adjustment IMO is going to be at Liberty University. It’s a little bit like Obama’s Camelback Church speech in tactics but a gutsy venue for Bernie on a lot of counts. If he pulls off something significant there, this could get very interesting.
Tennessee is Knoxville, Georgia is Athens, Alabama is Tuscaloosa. IMO the Texas venue to fill is Texas A&M; if you can excite an Aggie….
Notre Dame would be an interesting stadium to fill.
The critical message adjustment IMO is going to be at Liberty University. It’s a little bit like Obama’s Camelback Church speech in tactics but a gutsy venue for Bernie on a lot of counts. If he pulls off something significant there, this could get very interesting.
Yet I got slammed on Twitter by certain corners pointing that out!!
Heh count me as an opponent of his attendance. I’ll wait and see what he says to determine whether it was the right choice or not.
If Sanders’ message wasn’t strong, he wouldn’t be packing large event venues anywhere. On that measure, he’s doing better than Obama did at this point in 2007. And from what can be gleaned, he’s building a competent team on the ground and is doing well on the small donation fundraising front.
However, he does have two distinct disadvantages that Obama didn’t have. The DNC-institutional Democratic Party deck has been cleared for Clinton, and half or more of Obama’s campaign money came from large (Wall St. and Chicago) donors.
The social media generations could subvert that juggernaut, but they’re probably too busy with selfies and passing around other meaningless crap.
On that measure, he’s doing better than Obama did at this point in 2007.
Debatable. Obama drew 20,000 people to the Town Lake in Austin, Texas in February 2007. He attracted 20,000 at an outdoor rally at Yellow Jacket Park in Atlanta in April 2007. September 2007, 24,000 people to Washington Square Park.
You get the point.
More context:
Wasn’t Obama’s name ID higher then he entered the race than Sanders? Seems to me that he’d been high profile since the 2004 DEM convention. He may have been “clobbered” in the first debate but at least he was seen.
Couldn’t tell you; I backed Gravel.
I think the first time I heard of Obama was in 11th grade English in 2004 when I had to write an essay about war speeches (Obama’s anti-Iraq War speech and Patrick Henry’s pro-Revolutionary War speech).
Other than that? He hadn’t entered my radar until the mid-summer 2007 debates. Though none of the candidates really entered my radar until that point, so I’m not a good person to ask.
Anyway, if that’s the context, I’d argue the opposite…but I’m a bad judge because I’m a “social media generation” who’s too busy taking selfies.
Facebook – December 2005
Twitter – July 2006
smartphone selfies – 2010
Facebook and twitter came along just in time for an Obama campaign. Cool tech and cool, young candidate.
I’m curious about Marie3’s breakdown of states that includes party strength as a factor in a primary. That is relevant to the extent that a strong establishment requires the seeking of endorsements as well as orchestrating turnout. Endorsements generally come with a list of volunteers close to ready to go.
I think that the point that the delegate battles are not all winner take all is an excellent one. Are there any states in which the Democratic primary is winner-take-all? And then there are the caucus-convention-superdelegate breakdowns. So the strategy for delegates is quite complex, more so for a candidate who has not been in on these party mechanisms himself.
I’m really curious about what makes the Obama-Clinton primary map relevant. Actually, based on BooMan’s logic, a shaded map that allowed some grasp of the proportions of the split might be more informative.
Also, it is helpful to look at rallies by television market even if they are occurring in small towns and small venues. For example, starting with the T of Pennsylvania that BooMan pointed out, you have Pittsburgh, Wheeling-Steubenville, Parkersburg, Clarksburg-Weston, Bluefield-Beckley-Oak Hill, Roanoke-Lynchburg (which he is doing Liberty University on Sept 14), Tri-Cities TN, Knoxville, Chattanooga, Huntsville-Decatur-Florence AL, Birmingham-Anniston-Tuscaloosa. Having those folks know who Bernie is and what he stands for before they vote. Like people in Iowa, these people appreciate politicians who engage them as citizens and not as marks. A similar package would be Dayton, Lima, Toledo, Youngstown. Or Erie, Johnstown-Altoona, Scranton-Wilkes-Barre, Harrisburg-Lancaster-Lebanon-York. A rally in the Paducah-Cape Giradeau-Carbondale-McLeansboro-Poplar Bluff-Mount Vernon television market would be another one to gauge response. Contesting upstate New York might not be a bad idea either.
Bernie makes inroads into Clinton states exactly in the areas that people are hurting and cynical about government serving any helpful function. A wake-up call on Social Security and Medicare is certainly needed in these areas. The media is not going to tell them what the GOP plans for them.
Obama had a lot of good response from reporters in small television markets; covering a Presidential candidate is not a usual duty. No doubt the national owners will clamp down tighter on the media silence on Bernie. But word spreads in small media markets. And that plays very much into the proportional strategy BooMan is pointing to. It also preps a revisit if he succeeds in gaining the nomination, which opens up some parts of the map for the general election.
The same sort of strategy can be used in unacknowledged neighborhoods of large cities.
Doing the math and expanding the map are the key tasks. And that might present opportunities for additional coattails, which are essential in 2016.
Sort of like Dean’s “50 state strategy” expanded to “435 districts” on steroids?
Agree that Sanders needs to take his message to mid-sized population areas. However, he shouldn’t do that before he has assets on the ground in those locations and to do that, he needs money. In a general election that would mean going into the areas where people are hurting the most. For the primary, Sanders will have to stick to wherever people aren’t doing well and institutionally the Democratic Party doesn’t have a lock on the vote. (Mississippi? How weak must a party be to be defeated in a primary by an unknown truck driver with no money for Governor or US Senate (SC)? Gray’s opponents were two women of accomplishment.)
There’s been an assumption that Clinton inherits most of Obama’s ’08 institutional support and a goodly chunk of his primary voters and that her support will remain loyal. Entirely possible.
OTOH, Obama’s institutional support has not been fed and nurtured and Clinton’s is even longer toothed than it was.
Looking back to Iowa, in the ’04 election, Edwards locked up a large portion of the below state level institutional support. Gephardt pulled in some based on his long ago run. Team Dean did scramble throughout the state but there was slim pickings. Most were either on board with a candidate or waiting for a signal from the Vilsack/DLC contingent. Harkin, bless his heart, did endorse Dean late in the campaign, but he was by then a one man institution. So, the caucus results split 38%-32%-18%-11%.
Iowa had been so easy for Kerry and with Vilsack’s early endorsement of Clinton, it should have been easy for Clinton as well. So, what happened? 38%-30%-29%. It didn’t appear that Obama cut that deeply into the institutional power that favored Kerry and Edwards in ’04, but Vilsack’s power was waning.
How much power has the IA Democratic Party old guard lost in the past eight years? Was it the (perceived) person of Edwards or his message that took him to second place twice? If the former (he’s electable) that support more easily shifts to Clinton. Over half of Obama’s support could go there as well. If Clinton had enough of the on-the-ground puzzle pieces in her pocket at this point, can’t imagine why she’d dump a $1 million dollars into August TV commercials.
Let me come at this a different way. SuperTuesday
Alabama
Arkansas
1, Jonesboro
Colorado caucuses
Georgia
Massachusetts
Minnesota caucuses
North Carolina
Oklahoma
Tennessee
Texas- Caucus and primary
Vermont
Virginia
1, Norfolk-Portsmouth-Newport News
There looks to be groups of states that can focus activity.
Texas-Oklahoma-Arkansas
Alabama-Tennessee-Georgia-North Carolina-Virginia
New Hampshire-Massachusetts-Vermont
Iowa-Minnesota
And then there is Colorado, which are caucuses.
Bernie’s going to be having to creating local institutions where there are none as well as picking up local institutional support that is dissatisfied with establishment failures.
The asssets on the ground issue is a chicken-and-egg sort of issue. You have to be on the ground in order to enlist assets there. Presumably, the “exploratory” phase did some of this initial enlistment. And to do full precinct coverage on general election day, your target is 750,000 volunteers in the field distributed roughly at least 5 per precinct to turn out 75 million voters. A target for a winning margin in a Congressional seat is probably 180,000 in 2016. Yes, it’s a steep climb. But that’s what it takes to win, and there are 15 months to the general election. You can either buy that support or you can organize it.
“Virginia” is a bridge too far for team Sanders. The Democratic strongholds there and in DC are controlled by the Beltway and federal dollars (significant Pentagon dollars). Outside that area, Democrats skew conservative.
Message wise, Sanders should win in all economically struggling pockets/regions. Unfortunately, it looks like in the early going, many of them will be unavailable to him.
There is a current poll showing him doing better than HRC in NH. Obviously a neighboring state to VT, but still, it’s an early state, it’s a kingmaker state, and he needs to take it to be credible. So, one important place that he is doing well right now, 6 months before the actual vote.
Here’s some other data to consider.
Coattails states – US Senate
Alaska
Arizona
California
Colorado – SuperTuesday caucuses
Florida
Georgia – SuperTuesday primary
Illinois
Indiana
Louisiana
Missouri
Nevada
New Hampshire
North Carolina – SuperTuesday primary
Ohio
Pennsylvania
Wisconsin
Coattails -2016 – Governors
Delaware
Indiana
Missouri
Montana
New Hampshire
North Carolina – SuperTuesday primary
North Dakota
Oregon
Utah
Vermont – SuperTuesday primary
Washington
West Virginia
Having Bernie-affiliated primary candidates in all of these provides a framework for building an organization outside of schedule-driven states.