The Cult of Personality

This could turn out to be a three entry day for me.  There’s just that much to talk about.

 This is a really great article about a subject which has come up a lot today.  Jason Linkins looks at the exit polls from a number of sources to find that Clinton supporters are more likely to vote for McCain if Obama is the nominee than if the opposite were true.  In fact, 25% of Hillary voters would head over to McCain in a general election as opposed to only 10% of Obama supporters.

Not to give away the entire post, but he also points out that nearly half of Obama supporters going into last night had no problems with Hillary carrying on the fight even if she only won ONE of the big states.

In other words, Obama supporters aren’t zealots.

It’s a great article and you should check it out for yourself.

It also points to something I’m going to write about in my next blog with regards to Ohio…

Big State Theory

I’ll give my spin about last night later, as well as some thoughts on the disturbing exit polls from Ohio.

But first we need to address this “big state” idea.  Basically, the theory is that winning big states in the Democratic primary means you can win them in the general election, which either Democrat has to do.  I haven’t seen anyone really debunk this theory as the nonsense that it is, so I’m going to give it a shot.

First off, the idea that California would go to anyone but a Democrat or that Texas would go to anyone but a Republican is crazy, so a primary victory in either state in irrelevant.

But let’s look at the battleground states.  Let’s look at Ohio, for example.

Does the fact that Obama lost badly in Ohio mean he can’t win that state in a general election?  The numbers would seem to indicate that Ohio is just as much in play as any battleground state he won like, say, Missouri.

Thanks to the fine folks at Yahoo, we can see how Obama did in Ohio:

Obama: 979,025

That his popular vote total.

All the Republican candidates combined got 1,010,864.

That’s a difference of only 31,839.  And Obama lost Ohio — badly.  I’m willing to be at least 3% of those who voted for Hillary would vote for Obama in a general election.

Granted, turnout will be different for a general election, but that only proves my point: a primary election has NO barring on the results of a general election.

So the idea that Hillary (or anyone else, for that matter) winning big states proves she’s better off in a general election than Obama is ridiculous.

Super 2sday update, 9:50 PM

Well, what do you do with that?

MSNBC has called Texas for Hillary, which gives her three of four tonight…

 …but when the counting is done she might actually be even further BEHIND on delegates because he’s winning the Texas caucus.

The mystery fifty super delegates that Obama is rumored to have will have a big impact if announced on, say, Thursday.

It is a little ridiculous that Hillary technically can’t win on the vote of the people and is willing to go with that.  That just doesn’t seem above the table.

Super 2sday update, 7:23 PM

The small states went as predicted.  Obama is currently getting pummeled in Ohio.  The polls in NE Ohio stayed open late, which is a good sign for him, but I honestly don’t see him making up that much ground.

Then again, Chuck Todd from MSNBC just pointed out that Cinci, Cleveland, and Toledo haven’t reported in yet — most of the reporting up until this point has come from rural areas.  Obama’s winning on Columbus, the only major urban area that has any major reporting in.

Obama with a slight lead in Texas, although no votes reporting yet from Houston again, another Obama strong spot.  Hillary’s supposed to get some late votes from the border towns, though.

No Texas caucuses in yet, although MSNBC was at one that went to Obama.

The real question is how long I’ll be able to stay awake for this.

Super 2sday

See, the “2″ is because we’ve already had a “Super Tuesday.”  I’m clever, aren’t I?

Predictions for tonight:  Hillary will win Rhode Island and Ohio.  Obama will win Vermont and Texas (and keep in mind that Texas has a primary AND a caucus tonight).

Chuck Todd pointed out last night on Countdown that Hillary will, at most, gain 5-10 delegates, and that’s if she wins both Ohio and Texas.

 Jonathan Alter has a good article on the math going forward and how unfortunate it could be for the Democrats.

Bill Richardson did something very strange a few days ago, stating that whoever has the most delegates after Tuesday should be the nominee.  What’s strange about that is that Clinton can’t overcome Obama’s lead on Tuesday, so he’s basically saying that Obama should be the nominee.  So that begs the question: why doesn’t he just say that?  If he thinks it would be the best for the party to name Obama the nominee now, why isn’t he endorsing him, an act that would clearly help to push the nomination forward?

My guess?  Even though the math is clear, Richardson doesn’t want to influence the outcome of the results in Texas, which he could easily do by endorsing either candidate.  It’ll be interesting to see what he does after tonight, though.

Evidently, the Obama campaign are holding back a few trump cards.  They’ve yet to release their fundraising totals for last month which is speculated to be at least $50 million.  And, according to Tom Brokaw this morning morning on MSNBC, a source “very close” to the Obama campaign says they’ve kept FIFTY declared superdelegates a secret.

If either of those things are true, they’re big weapons to pull out during any given news cycle.  I would have to imagine that if the Obama camp feels like Hillary is getting too much good press out of tonight’s results, they’ll drop those bits on consecutive days, if not all at once.

Should be an interesting evening.