By Jim Tankersley
The Democratic presidential candidates are taking a long-overdue break from the campaign trail this weekend, just in time for Easter. Hillary Clinton is home in New York. Barack Obama is set, after an event in southern Oregon today, to embark on a mini-vacation to … somewhere.
We’ll take this opportunity to reassess the race. In particular: Who’s going to win?
It just so happens that a flock of journalists, analysts and bloggers have weighed in this week on that very question. Very roughly, they break into two camps: those who believe Clinton has a “path” to the Democratic nomination, and those who believe she has almost no hope left.
Leading the way for the latter camp are Jim Vandehei and Mike Allen of Politico. “One big fact has largely been lost in the recent coverage of the Democratic presidential race,” they write in a piece published yesterday. “Hillary Rodham Clinton has virtually no chance of winning.”
On the other side, Jay Cost of the RealClearPolitics.com “HorseRaceBlog”. This week, he laid out what he called a “plausible, but unlikely, path to the nomination for Clinton.”
Both sides generally agree on the parameters of the debate: that Obama appears almost certain to end the primary season with more pledged delegates than Clinton; that he appears likely, particularly in light of developments this week that make do-over votes in Florida and Michigan appear next-to-impossible, to finish with a lead in the overall popular vote from the combined primaries and caucuses; and that to secure the nomination, Clinton will need to win over a huge chunk of the remaining uncommitted “superdelegates.”
The big disagreement is whether Clinton could conceivably pull off a superdelegate-fueled victory even if she trails in pledged delegates and popular votes.Jay Cost says she could. His reasoning rests on the notion that Clinton can win over superdelegates with an argument that she is the “legitimate” nominee.
He notes that there are “many ways” to count the popular vote in the primaries – for example, by including Michigan and Florida’s tallies even if their delegates aren’t on track to be seated at the Democratic National Convention. Clinton could argue that she’s winning the most legitimate count of those votes.
“Come back to win a popular vote total, and use that to persuade the super delegates. That’s her angle,” Cost writes. “I think it is a tough one, but I don’t think it is impossible. I can imagine him ending the race by winning big in North Carolina – but I can also see her winning big in Pennsylvania, keeping it close in North Carolina and winning big in Indiana (held on the same day). That would leave Kentucky, West Virginia, Puerto Rico, Oregon, Montana, and South Dakota. There is promising terrain there for her.”
The Clinton campaign is making its “persuasion” pitch to superdelegates all about electability. In a memo to reporters this week, chief strategist Mark Penn highlighted several polls showing Clinton running stronger in the general election against Republican John McCain in states such as Ohio and Missouri. “The more that the voters learn about Barack Obama,” Penn wrote, “the more his ability to beat John McCain is declining compared to Hillary.”
Vandehei and Allen contend it would take “an electoral miracle” for Clinton to win the popular vote, and that the only way she could win the nomination is “if Democratic superdelegates are ready to risk a backlash of historic proportions from the party’s most reliable constituency” – a prospect they say Clinton advisers only call a 10 percent probability.
Barring a popular-vote win, they write, “she has only one scenario for victory. An African-American opponent and his backers would be told that, even though he won the contest with voters, the prize is going to someone else. People who think that scenario is even remotely likely are living on another planet.”
Christopher Beam of Slate is more succinct: “Hillary’s path to the nomination is not ‘narrow,'” he wrote this week. “It’s barricaded.”
Add it all together and what do you have? A prescription for several more months of campaign attacks. Clinton’s electability argument only gains strength if Obama’s poll numbers keep dropping – which is to say, if Clinton keeps hammering him on questions of experience and substance.
Outside events are the wild card. Could another controversy on the “Rev. Wright” level convince superdelegates to abandon Obama? It’s worth noting that, to this point, that a tough month for Obama has not led to superdelegate defections. But if this campaign has taught us one thing, it’s that as soon as you think you’ve figured it out, the ground shifts again.
