If It's Not Over Tuesday, Advantage Obama
By Tom Hayden, PDA Advisory Board member
February 5, 2008
The insiders knew, even before last week’s California debate, that Barack Obama was surging in Clinton strongholds like California, coming from a 20-point deficit to a statistical dead heat. Hillary Clinton still stands a definite chance of prevailing in California but only because of the thousands of absentee ballots cast before Obama’s stunning close.
Those insiders have long believed that Clinton, with her deep institutional relationships, could safely assume that Super Tuesday was a fire wall against any lesser-known opponent. California, New York, Connecticut, New Jersey and Massachusetts, with over 1,000 electoral votes, were considered beyond assault. Now it appears that the Obama movement is closing in on multiple battlegrounds, draining vital electoral votes away from Clinton. The Obama campaign is targeting states and congressional districts with a sense that it knows what it is doing.
The Obama surge may be powerful enough to carry him to surprising wins on Tuesday. But for Obama, unlike Clinton, not losing Super Tuesday is winning. If he does well enough, Obama will have the momentum for the next stage his campaign has been planning for: the 26 Democratic primaries that lie ahead. With momentum from Super Tuesday, he will be competitive in:
- Louisiana, Washington and perhaps Nebraska on February 9,
- Maine on February 10,
- DC, Maryland, and Virginia on February 12,
- Hawaii and Wisconsin on February 19, Ohio,
- Rhode Island, Texas, Vermont, Wyoming and Mississippi on March 11,
- Pennsylvania on April 22,
- Guam, Indiana, North Carolina, West Virginia, Kentucky and Oregon on May 20,
- Montana, South Dakota and Puerto Rico on June 3-7.
- That doesn’t include Michigan or Florida’s contested electors, of course, or places like Guam and the Virgin Islands.
It’s not that the Clintons lack support in these states. But they have no movement to carry them, no new voters, only local incumbents. The Clinton strategy has assumed winning on Super Tuesday while the Obama campaign has been intent on turning the campaign into a protracted battle where voters can become more familiar with the challenger.
So this probably goes on, and if it does, the advantage is with Obama.
Either way, unifying the Democratic Party will be a challenge. The vast majority of Obama supporters will not be easily persuaded to transfer their enthusiasm, time or money to Hillary Clinton. That’s just a sociological fact. The “party” of Clinton will not yield its privileges easily to Obama either. That’s a sociological fact too. Counting on anti-Republican sentiment may not be enough to drive sufficient voters to the polls. Peace diplomacy will be needed at home, perhaps a macro-agreement to end the Iraq war and transfer funds to universal health care, to end the current trade agreements and build jobs here and stronger ties with Latin America, to end oil dependency and really battle global warming. But those discussions are for Wednesday and beyond. Today it’s on.
TOM HAYDEN is the author of The Tom Hayden Reader [2008] and Ending the War in Iraq [2007]. He served 18 years in the California legislature, has been a delegate to five Democratic conventions, and twice served as a member of the party’s platform committee.
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