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The past 24 hours have been a combination of sky highs and brutal
lows for Hillary Clinton. She won by double digits in West Virginia—one
of her biggest victories yet. But a superdelegate shutout (Obama won
four today to her zero) and a crippling campaign debt suggest the
victory will be short-lived. We'll bump her up 1.3 points to 2.9 percent, if only because tonight's victory all but guarantees she'll stick around a few more weeks.
First, the good news: Clinton's West Virginia victory gives her what she most desperately needs—arguments.
Her win, while expected, managed to suck away much of Obama's normal
coalition (minus blacks, who made up 4 percent of the electorate). She
can say Obama is weakening, that he's vulnerable in the general, and
that voters want her to stick it out. Not even a landslide victory
would earn Clinton enough pledged delegates to challenge Obama's tally,
and Obama's popular-vote lead
remains daunting. But she now has an excuse to stay in. In the words of
MSNBC's Rachel Maddow, Clinton is now an "understudy candidate,"
waiting in the wings to see if Obama catches the flu.
Read more at the Hillary Deathwatch.
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CNN’s projecting that Hillary Clinton will win West Virginia big time. The question is how, if at all, this can help her. She’s been running out of arguments for weeks. But here are a few ways she can spin today's results:
1) Obama’s coalition is splintering. Clinton’s major argument has been that Obama can’t win working-class white voters, and that he relies on too narrow a coalition. Well, tonight helps her case. Clinton won almost every single demographic normally loyal to Obama. She won all income slices, although less decisively among wealthier voters. She won 54 percent of independents, as well as 59 percent of conservatives. She took college graduates by 57 percent. (She even won voters with postgraduate work, 51-47. Hey now!) And, most surprisingly, she won young voters (age 17-29) with 57 percent. Everyone expected Clinton to win West Virginia because of its demographics—they didn’t expect Obama to slip quite so much among his usual fans.
2) He’s too vulnerable. It looked like Obama’s campaign disasters—the Rev. Wright, “bitter,” the flag pin—didn’t hurt him much in Indiana and North Carolina. In West Virginia, though, they clearly did. Fifty-one percent of voters told pollsters they thought Obama shares Wright’s views. Only 47 percent of voters said Obama shares their values—a pretty clear stand-in for questions of patriotism. Clinton could argue that these voters are the tip of a big, judgmental iceberg of general election voters. If you think Obama’s having trouble now, wait till all the racists come out of the woodwork in November.
3) Economy blues. Consider this: Sixty-four percent of voters named the economy as their top issue. At the same time, a whopping 63 percent said her gas tax holiday proposal was a good idea. That despite almost unanimous opposition to the idea by experts. Clinton can now say she’s got the people on her side. She can also argue that if the economy crashes between now and November, she stands to benefit much more than Obama.
4) It’s not over! According to Fox News, 78 percent of voters think Clinton should stay in the race. That includes a good chunk of Obama supporters. If Clinton needs to persuade superdelegates to hold their tongues until June 3, this is the stat she’ll cite. And right now, buying time is the best thing Clinton can do.
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This presidential race is full of celebrity look-alikes. Hillary Clinton and Star Trek's Tasha Yar. Fred Thompson and Javier Bardem. But rarely does someone intimately involved in the race look exactly like someone else intimately involved in the race. Behold the eerie resemblance of new Libertarian Party candidate Bob Barr to America's most famous pastor, the Rev. Jeremiah Wright:
Other things the two men have in common: outspoken personalities, a love of TV cameras, and a roughly equal chance of winning the presidency.
Thanks to Slate's Bill Smee for spotting the resemblance.
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Following up on my last item on West Virginia, a reader spotted another problem with Clinton’s claim that “[e]very nominee has carried the state’s primary since 1976, and no Democrat has won the White House without winning West Virginia since 1916.”
“How many of those West Virginia primaries only had one candidate on the ballot?” Jason Bryant asks. “WV is about the 50th contest in this primary season. If it's been that way for a long time then it seems there wouldn't have been many contests where everyone other than the front runner hadn't dropped out.”
It’s true, West Virginia has traditionally been one of the last states to vote. This year, it’s the 51st contest. In 2004, it was the 40th. It came 43rd in 2000. Bill Clinton was the presumptive nominee before West Virginia’s primary in 1992, as was Michael Dukakis by the time he won the state by a landslide in May of 1988.
So really, it’s not that West Virginia is a litmus test for who becomes the Democratic nominee; it’s that the nominee is usually already decided by the time West Virginia rolls around. It looks like this year will be the exception.
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Hillary Clinton will declare victory in the West Virginia primary tonight against a senator who no longer even considers himself her opponent. While Clinton is scheduled to be in Charleston, W.Va., for Election Night celebrations, Barack Obama will be in Missouri, a state that held its primary more than three months ago. His message couldn’t be clearer: He is now campaigning against John McCain.
This seems extraordinarily unwise. While one can argue the merits of downplaying an unwinnable battle against an opponent who can’t win the war, Obama stands the risk of alienating Democrats who do not yet support him. It resembles the familiar architecture of college rivalries; in order to belittle its counterpart, one school inevitably acts like it’s too good to even compete.
Here’s the speech Obama should be delivering tonight somewhere in West Virginia—say, Morgantown, where there’s a big university.
Some of you may be surprised to see me here tonight. For the past several weeks, it has been clear that Senator Clinton held a commanding lead in West Virginia, and I congratulate her on her victory tonight.
You know, a lot of the senior advisers in my campaign recommended that I skip West Virginia altogether. In fact, ever since we won North Carolina last week and fought to nearly a tie in Indiana, many people have advised that we shift the focus of the campaign to Senator McCain and the general election.
Now, I don’t mean to belittle the advice of the extraordinarily talented strategists on my campaign. Without them, we would not be here today. But let me be very clear: It would be a disservice to Senator Clinton and a disservice to the Democratic Party if we did not continue to compete in this primary as long as there are two strong candidates for the nomination.
In that spirit, I have come here tonight to thank those West Virginians who did vote for me and to say this to those who did not: In the event that I am the nominee for president in the fall, I would be honored to have your vote. I believe it is this preference for robust options in candidates that gave me the opportunity to succeed in this election, and I will not forget that.
Senator McCain will be a formidable opponent in the fall, and I understand the temptation to rev up the general election campaign as soon as possible. But charging into this important contest when the Democratic Party has yet to rally behind one candidate is, I think, unwise. So let me say it again: So long as there are two candidates, you will see me fighting for every vote in the remaining contests.
Idealistic and a tad sappy? Absolutely. To which I respond: When has that ever stopped him before? And as my fellow Trailheader Christopher Beam pointed out to me over by the coffee maker this morning, such a message from Obama might—just might—give Clinton a graceful note to end on.
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The Clinton campaign fired off a new "memo" today arguing that West Virginia is essential to winning in November: "Every nominee has carried the state’s primary since 1976, and no Democrat has won the White House without winning West Virginia since 1916." Clinton predicts that she would beat McCain there, "based on the strength of her economic message," whereas Obama would lose.
But back in April, NBC News predicted on its electoral map that West Virginia wouldn’t be a swing state. Rather, they put it directly in McCain’s "base."
NBC’s Mark Murray explained to me the rationale. Both Al Gore and John Kerry lost West Virginia in 2000 and 2004 because of social issues like guns and abortion, even when people thought the sagging economy would put the state in the Democratic column. (Voters linked Gore with the Clinton administration’s anti-gun laws.) Clinton or Obama could face a similar fate. Sure, the economy could be such a wreck that it overshadows social issues and hands the state to a Democrat, but the past few elections suggest that’s unlikely.
"If we were doing that map now, I think no doubt she’d do better than Obama against McCain in West Virginia," Murray says, adding that they’d probably have the state lean toward McCain rather than putting it in his "base."