Posts with the tag 'Democratic Nomination'
Looks like all the signs are pointing to it.. but I’ll believe it when I see it.
Hillary Rodham Clinton will concede Tuesday night that Barack Obama has the delegates to secure the Democratic nomination, campaign officials said, effectively ending her bid to be the nation’s first female president.
Obama is 40 delegates shy of clinching the nomination, but he is widely expected to make up the difference Tuesday with superdelegate support and votes in South Dakota and Montana. Once he reaches the magic number of 2,118, Clinton will acknowledge that he has secured the necessary delegates to be the nominee.
The former first lady will stop short of formally suspending or ending her race in her speech in New York City.
Is it really over for Hillary, or does she have some trick up her sleeve?
UPDATE: According to The Hill, Hillary’s campaign is still saying she won’t drop out tonight.
Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton’s (D-N.Y.) campaign spent much of the morning creating mass confusion as to what the evening could bring.
Terry McAuliffe, Clinton’s campaign chairman, said on MSNBC that he thinks Clinton would concede if Obama passes the delegate threshold Tuesday night.
Since those comments, however, and a subsequent story by The Associated Press that repeated that the former first lady was set to concede, the Clinton campaign has pushed back, asserting that the New York senator has no intention of dropping out Tuesday night.
UPDATE, by Mark Noonan: She didn’t quit. Not even slightly. Interesting.
Tags: Barack Obama, Democratic Nomination, Hillary Clinton
June 3rd, 2008
Hillary scores big victory Kentucky while Obama has won a majority of pledged delegates.
Clinton won Kentucky by more than 30 points, but Obama’s share of the state’s 51 delegates was enough put him over the threshold, according to CNN estimates.
Obama’s top strategist, David Axelrod, said this was an “important milestone,” but not the end of the trail.
A candidate needs 2,026 delegates to win the Democratic nomination. Obama has 1,932 total delegates, while Clinton has 1,753.
After Kentucky’s results came in, Clinton thanked her supporters for handing her a victory “even in the face of some pretty tough odds.”
“Tonight we have achieved an important victory,” Clinton said in Louisville.
“It’s not just Kentucky bluegrass that’s music to my ears. It’s the sound of your overwhelming vote of confidence even in the face of some pretty tough odds.”
Clinton beat Obama across all age groups, income groups and education levels in Kentucky.
Eighty-nine percent of Tuesday’s voters in Kentucky were white, according to the exit polls. Among them, Clinton won 72-22 percent. Nine percent of the voters were African-American and they overwhelmingly broke for Obama, 87-7 percent.
While Camp Obama may be patting themselves on the back for hitting their milestone, there’s some bleak news that may or may not influence superdelegates:
The exit polls from Kentucky also suggest a deep division among Democrats. Video Watch how Clinton’s win could affect the race »
Two-thirds of Clinton’s supporters there said they would vote Republican or not vote at all rather than for Obama, according to the polls.
Forty-one percent of Clinton supporters said they’d cast their vote for John McCain, the presumptive Republican nominee, and 23 percent said they would not vote at all.
I’m looking forward to November.
Tags: Democratic Nomination, Hillary Clinton, Polls, Superdelegates
May 20th, 2008
Byron York over at NRO takes note:
Her landslide 67-26 victory over Obama in West Virginia — she won by 147,410 votes — won’t change that situation. The oft-repeated fact that no Democrat since 1916 has won the White House without winning West Virginia won’t change it, either. But together, those two facts show just how far Democrats have ventured into uncharted territory this year. If Obama is to win the White House, he’ll have to do it in a brand-new way, winning states that Democrats haven’t won lately with diminished support in states that have been important to Democratic victories in the past. Clinton’s campaign reminds Democrats of that, and it makes some of them nervous…
…Clinton repeated her insistence that delegates from Florida and Michigan — “all of their delegates” — be seated. “I believe we should honor the votes cast by 2.3 million people in those states,” she said. Her demand was pooh-poohed in some circles of the commentariat, but the question for Democrats is: Why is that such a radioactive proposition? This is the party that got rather excited over 537 votes in Florida in 2000, the party that would like to pass something called the Count Every Vote Act, the party that has consistently favored greater enfranchisement over stricter enforcement of the rules (and sometimes the law). Sure, Clinton wants to change the agreement that existed going in to Florida and Michigan, but circumstances have changed, too. Since when have Democrats been such sticklers for unbending rules? Why do so many in the party insist that millions of votes in two key states be counted only if they don’t matter — that is, if the result is a fait accompli — and not be counted if they do?
If they were counted now — even if some of them were counted now — things might be quite different. According to the Real Clear Politics total, when one includes estimated vote totals in caucus states (a factor which favors Obama) plus results from Florida (which favor Clinton), but nothing from Michigan, where Obama’s name was not on the ballot, Obama’s lead in the national popular vote is 411,915. That figure is less than Obama’s margin of victory in his home of Cook County, Illinois, where, according to the Illinois Board of Elections, Obama won by 429,052 votes. By other counts, Obama’s lead is far less than his winning margin in Cook County. In other words, take away Cook County and Obama is the loser in the national popular vote race. He’s the president of Chicago.
Nevertheless, the Obama steamroller goes on. “This race, I believe, is over,” former Democratic party chairman — and Clinton supporter — Roy Romer told reporters on an Obama conference call Tuesday morning. “It is time for the party to unify, to get beyond the primary season, and to begin the general election.” His words echo those of dozens of top party figures in recent weeks. But they haven’t quite answered Hillary Clinton’s fundamental question: Why?
Whether or not Clinton’s argument is strong - and I believe it is - the plain fact of the matter is that in some of the Democrats’ core constituencies, Obama is not the desired candidate. It is true enough that Obama might be able to sway them back to his standard by November, but he may not - and any time he has to spend shoring up his base is that much less time he has for the vital work of poaching in GOP territory to cobble together 270 electoral votes. Polling indicates that Obama is the weaker Democrat, but perhaps the better overall candidate - Hillary is the stronger Democrat, but may be the weaker overall candidate…its kind of a wash; either of them can beat McCain, and either of them can be beaten by McCain. So, why the Democrat angst?
Down ballot; at least, so it seems to me.
The Democratic leadership understands that a failure to nominate Obama might greatly depress black American turnout in November - its not so much a worry that they’ll vote GOP (a few might, most won’t), but that they won’t vote at all…and while a large black turnout in the South probably won’t move any States towards the Democrats in the electoral college, it does ensure that a lot of Southern Democrats retain/gain office. A depressed black vote, on the other hands, means that a lot of Southern Democrats who count on a high turnout of black voters going 90% Democrat are at risk of defeat. Winning the White House is a very much desired goal - but retaining the power they’ve already got is much, much more important for the Democratic powers that be. They want Hillary out because in no conceivable case can they allow her to gain the nomination - and the quicker they get her out, the better Obama’s chances at uniting the entire Democratic coalition.
It is more the worry of losing a dozen House seats and a couple Senate seats which gets Democrats worried right now - not so much worry about beating McCain; that and the potential loss in State legislative seats right in front of the 2010 census. Politics is an interesting thing, and the funny thing about 2008 may be the Democrats nominating the weaker candidate in order to secure what they’ve got.
Tags: Democratic Divisions, Democratic Nomination, HillBama
May 15th, 2008
While Obama is figuring out what sort of decor he wants in the White House, Hillary still refuses to go quietly into the night:
Those who thought the Democratic presidential nomination was finished might have walked out of McKinley Middle School Friday night believing U.S. Sen. Hillary Clinton still has a fighting chance.
Former president Bill Clinton said the naysayers “want half of you to stay home” on Election Day. But, he said, if West Virginians turn out for his wife “in big, big numbers, your neighbors in Kentucky will be energized and try to follow your performance.”
West Virginia’s primary election is Tuesday, while Kentucky’s follows that by one week.
The former president spoke to about 400 people in a hot gymnasium, starting about 90 minutes late. A spokeswoman said Clinton was late because he insisted on shopping at the Blenko glass factory in Milton for Mother’s Day gifts.
Clinton reportedly found plenty of gifts, and he also found an enthusiastic crowd, not yet ready to hand the Democratic nomination over to Illinois Sen. Barack Obama.
“Bill and Hillary Clinton have a great commitment to West Virginia, and this state loves them,” said Marie Prezioso, the state party’s national committeewoman, who has committed to Hillary Clinton as a super delegate.
St. Albans resident Jim Canterbury, a House of Delegates candidate, said he wants a president who knows how to be tough, and the New York senator fits that bill.
“I think it’ll be great to have a woman as president,” he said. “I think she’s proven to be quite a fighter.”
Everyone knows that Hillary will crush Obama in the West Virginia primary - but to keep her hopes alive at all, she’ll need a very high turnout as a way of telling the Democratic powers that be (and, of course, the super delegates) that while the elite and the MSM have settled on Obama as the nominee, Democratic rank and file (who will be vital in November) have yet to take to Obama. We’ll have to see if she can pull it off, and change the dynamics of the race just one more time.
Tags: Democratic Nomination, HillBama, West Virginia Primary
May 12th, 2008
Sherman Frederick in the Las Vegas Review-Journal figures it cuts both ways for the Democratics:
Democrats bristle at talking about this in plainer terms. They say Sen. Hillary Clinton has found her base — the “working class.” That’s why she won in the Rust Belt primaries. That’s her great hope in Kentucky and West Virginia.
But calling Clinton’s strategy one of kowtowing to the “working class” doesn’t quite say it, does it? Isn’t this just old-fashioned racism within the Democratic Party?
When Hillary strategists say they are winning the “working class,” they don’t mean they are winning working people with a household income of, say, less than $50,000. All the exit polls show quite clearly that lower middle-class people who work split between Sen. Barack Obama and Sen. Clinton. The difference is generally skin color. Hillary wins the lion’s share of the “working-class” white Democrats. And, sadly, as Hillary’s campaign has become meaner and more to the point, that margin has become bigger.
The Clinton racism strategy first became apparent in Nevada, when her struggling campaign began to publicly talk about her “Hispanic firewall” against Obama among the rank-and-file in the Culinary union. It hit the national consciousness soon thereafter when former President Bill Clinton, after Hillary lost the South Carolina primary, dismissed Obama’s big win as a race-inspired victory akin to Jesse Jackson’s success in that state years ago.
The record clearly shows that Hillary’s campaign was the first to use Obama’s race against him. The strategy gained an unexpected boost when Sen. Obama’s former pastor, the egomaniacal Rev. Jeremiah Wright, cribbed the Obama spotlight only to show the world that racism could be a black thing, too. The opportunistic Clinton campaign shamelessly took full advantage of the tension. They not only raised questions about what the Wright debacle meant for an Obama presidency, they slyly positioned Hillary, like a latter-day George Wallace (the Alabama governor, not the very funny Las Vegas comedian), as the “working-class” candidate…
…The “superdelegate” whisper campaign goes something like this: Hillary is better built to win in November. Obama is soft and elitist. He’s a dangerous unknown quantity. But most importantly, Mr. and Mrs. Democratic Insider Superdelegate, look at the voter numbers in key states. Forget about pledged delegates, wins and losses and overall popular vote. Look deep into the numbers of the key states Democrats must win in November.
Do you see those “working-class” numbers? Those are Hillary people. Those are the people who will win the White House for Democrats this fall. Those are the people who count because, faced with a choice between Obama and Sen. John McCain, “working-class” Democrats will vote for McCain.
It’s a disgusting display for which Democrats ought to be alarmed and ashamed. The remedy is this: Stop calling Hillary’s base the “working class” and start calling it what it is.
I’m not so sure about this - about the concept that Hillary’s appeal to working class white voters is evidence of lingering racism, or Hillary’s playing up to it. I believe that Obama would be one of the very worst Presidents we’ve ever had - he might even redeem Jimmy Carter from the basement of Presidential legacies…but I don’t go telling black friends that they are fools for voting Obama. I understand it - its akin to the way Catholics went nuts for JFK in 1960, even though JFK (a) wasn’t much of a Catholic and (b) even though he wasn’t a very good candidate as far as actual qualifications for office go. But white support for Obama amongst black Americans can be traced in large measure to pride over one of their own doing well, opposition to Obama doesn’t necessarily stem from racial animosity, overt or covert. Opposition to Obama stems from, in my view, his elitism and his arrogant condescension to average Americans - Wright was damaging to Obama, but “bitter” was far more so…what Wright said was what Wright said, and thus Obama could distance himself, at least to a degree, form it…but Obama’s comment about bitter Americans clinging to God and guns, that was out of his own mouth, and let all of us know what he really thinks about us.
Sherman’s view - that Hillary has played an ugly, race-based political calculation - may be true in the narrow sense; for all we know, Hillary did decide to make a covert play to race, but even if Hillary hadn’t done so, I think that working class white people - who are a lot smarter than most political elites - especially liberal elites - give them credit for - would have been turned off to Obama by Obama’s own words.
Tags: black vote, blue collar vote, Democratic Nomination, HillBama, race card
May 12th, 2008
Jay Cost over at Real Clear Politics says, no, and here’s why:
…Oxendine says in his analysis of Indiana and North Carolina: “Appalachia didn’t budge [on Tuesday]. She is going to absolutely blow him out of the water in West VA and KY.”
So, here’s my question. What happens to “It’s Over” if Clinton pulls a 40-point victory in West Virginia on Tuesday, then follows it up a week later with a 30-point victory in Kentucky? If these states turn out in the same margins that states since March 4th have averaged, that would imply a net of about 290,000 votes for Clinton. That puts her within striking distance of a reasonable popular vote victory. “Over” will be over as we turn our attention to Puerto Rico.
For some time now, there has been very little chance of Hillary overtaking Obama in the pledged delegate race - really, since Super Tuesday, Hillary’s path to victory has revolved around her securing a larger percentage of the popular vote as a means of convincing super delegates that Obama can’t win in the fall, so they may as well back her, who has shown she has a chance. This is, actually, a very valid theory - but it ignores the fact that Hillary is despised by the ultra-left and his mistrusted by an apparant majority of the American people. In other words, even if it could be demonstrated that Hillary has more votes than Obama and is the stronger fall candidate, some Democrats might still go with Obama, just to get a clean break with Clinton. Meanwhile, however, there is no reason for Hillary to quit - not yet, at any rate.
Tags: Democratic Nomination, HillBama, Kentucky, West Virginia
May 10th, 2008
Interesting:
“It’s all about psychology,” said political commentator Roland Martin. “That is, you want to create the impression, even if you don’t have 2,025, you are the nominee.”
As Obama shifts his focus to the likely Republican nominee, at his campaign headquarters on Michigan Avenue campaign workers are planning a big celebration for the evening of May 20, when votes will be counted in Kentucky and Oregon and they expect Obama will have clinched a majority of the elected, pledged delegates.
“We are building toward that day when we can claim a majority of the pledged delegates, and we believe that’s going to be on May 20 and I believe that’s gonna be a big night for those of us in this camapaign,” said Obama political strategist, David Axelrod.
But Rep. Jack Franks, a Clinton supporter, countered, “Declaring mission accomplished doesn’t make it so – all you have to do is ask George Bush about that. And that’s why we have to take this to the convention and let the delegates decide.”
Illinois co-chair of the Clinton campaign, Franks said the goal of superdelegates and all Democrats should be to nominate the strongest candidate. He predicted Clinton would eventually win.
Axelrod said that, while Clinton has the right to keep campaigning, Democrats have always given their nomination to the candidate who won the most elected delegates.
They really want Hillary out - the Obama people, I mean; they aren’t being at all kind about it, really. They want their candidate to be able to rest up and build a national organization for the fall, and they don’t want something as petty as the fact they haven’t won yet to interfere….this is getting rather standard for Democrats. You know, not actually caring what the election results are but just insisting that once they’ve got the result they want, its all over.
For Hillary, it now becomes a calculation - can she prevent Obama, even if by one delegate, from getting a majority of the elected delegates by May 20th? If so, then the Obama’s camp talk of May 20th victory will seem like the worst sort of hubris. On the other hand, if Hillary is convinced that Obama is the candidate who will get beaten in November, then perhaps her best move is to gracefully exit, loyally back Obama and then wait for another chance in 2012? Come what may, I expect Obama to be the nominee - but it will be interesting to see how all this comes out.
Tags: Democratic Nomination, HillBama
May 9th, 2008
Quite honestly, I didn’t expect this to happen - looks like Obama will do much better than a 15 percentage point win, and from what I’ve read, Hillary’s lead in Indiana is a bit fragile in that a lot of possibly pro-Obama areas have yet to report.
UPDATE: Obama gives his victory speech - talking of change, as usual…but he still won black voters, young voters, and upper class white voters. This will give him New York, California and New England in November, but not the White House…
UPDATE: Perhaps we should be more careful - latest results show Obama leading 55% to 43% in North Carolina; still a very big win, but not the overwhelmingly crushing victory originally thought.
UPDATE, by Matt Margolis: Hillary wins Indiana. Race continues…
UPDATE: And Hillary once again lays down the marker - she wants Florida and Michigan counted.
UPDATE: Over at The Corner Kathy Lopez feels that Hillary’s statement that she’ll support the Democratic nominee is part of a pre-concession swan song to her campaign - I’m not so sure; Ramesh Ponnuru, meanwhile, points out this interesting bit:
Slice up the voters by ideology, “very conservative” to “very liberal,” and you find that in both N.C. and Ind., Obama did better the further left the voters were. As E. J. Dionne Jr. just pointed out on NPR—we’re commenting on the elections—that is a new and potentially ominous pattern.
Unless America really has become a center/left nation (as our leftists insist it did in 2006), Obama cannot win unless he can appeal more to the center and at least some of the right - at least to the extent of keeping the right from growing too enthusiastic about McCain vis a vis Obama. My view is that America in 2008 is what America has always been - center/right.
Tags: Democratic Nomination, HillBama, Indiana Primary, North Carolina Primary
May 6th, 2008
Never thought I’d say that I agree with Bill Clinton, but Obama supporters do seem to be playing the race card in an attempt to bring the nomination process to an end:
Clinton’s solid win in the Pennsylvania primary exposed a quandary for the party. Her backers may be convinced that only she can win the white, working-class voters that the Democratic nominee will need in the general election, but many African American leaders say a Clinton nomination — handed to her by superdelegates — would result in a disastrous breach with black voters.
“If this party is perceived by people as having gone into a back room somewhere and brokered a nominee, that would not be good for our party,” House Majority Whip James E. Clyburn (S.C.), the highest ranking African American in Congress, warned yesterday. “I’m telling you, if this continues on its current course, [the damage] is going to be irreparable.”
That fear, plus a more general sense that Clinton’s only route to victory would be through tearing down her opponent, has led even some black Democrats who are officially neutral in the race, such as Clyburn, to speak out.”If you have any, any kind of loyalty to the Democratic Party, perhaps you need to rethink your strategy and bow out gracefully in order to save this party from a disastrous end in November,” Rep. William Lacy Clay (Mo.), an African American Obama supporter, said in an appeal to Clinton.
In other words: “Back out, Hillary, ’cause the loyalty of black voters to the Democratic party is dependent upon Obama securing the nomination.” I get the impression that, certainly among the black Democratic leadership, they feel it is “their turn” to run the show - 40 years of rock-solid support for the Democratic party, and the bill has now come due. Keep in mind that “disasterous end” has two meanings - a loss of the White House, as well as a possibility of black voters ceasing to be so loyal to the Democratic party. Too bad that support for the Democratic party is not based on shared American values - its all about getting a piece of the pie and ensuring that the swag is divvied up equitably; a little bit of concern about America over the past 40 years, and Democrats wouldn’t be in this mess.
Tags: Democratic Nomination, HillBama
April 26th, 2008
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