Last night’s Democratic presidential primaries in NC and IN changed nothing, or changed everything, depending on whose account you choose to accept (see the previous Staff post for a compilation of post-primary “reads.”)
From one point of view, HRC survived yet another definitive blow to her candidacy by pulling out a narrow win in IN, which mattered more than NC because it was perceived as a “toss-up” state. (Clinton’s own spin last night capitalized on Barack Obama’s ill-advised remark after PA that IN would be a “tie-breaker.”). The next state to vote is WV on May 13–a place where Clinton should win very big–followed by KY (another likely Clinton win) and OR on May 20, and then MT, SD and PR on June 3. In the middle of this final stretch comes the May 31 meeting of the DNC’s Rules and Bylaws Committee where Clinton is praying for a decision to seat at least some delegates from MI and FL, while retroactively validating her popular vote margins in the two states.
From another point of view (the one most often heard from media pundits last night), Clinton lost her one chance to throw a monkey wrench into Obama’s nomination by losing NC, and/or by losing the overall combined delegate and popular vote by a sizable margin (Obama basically erased the popular vote margin Clinton won in PA). She’s out of money again, as witnessed by her cancellation of today’s campaign events to focus on fundraising. Moreover, Obama is now clearly out of the tailspin that briefly threatened his candidacy when the Rev. Jeremiah Wright decided to claim headlines for several days. He can now afford to cut a deal on MI and FL, and exert pressure on superdelegates and party leaders to seal the deal well before the convention.
As Chris Bowers pointed out pungently in a late-night post, the “changes everything” interpretation is a little strange, insofar as the delegate and popular vote math that suddenly seems so compelling to the chattering classes after last night’s results has been pointing to the virtual certainty of an Obama nomination for well over a month now, and maybe longer:

All of the arguments that could be used by the punditry to declare the nomination campaign over could have been used really at any point since Wisconsin. For some reason, those arguments appear to be sticking tonight, whereas they weren’t earlier. According to the logic that ends the campaign tonight, there was no reason to torture us for the past two months, except to damage Democrats for the sake of damaging Democrats

Chris hints at one factor in the shifting media narrative of the contest that I’ve always thought was an irrationally big deal: the fixation of the media with “wins” and “losses” in particular states, compounded by a focus on beating expectations. In terms of the actual mechanics of winning the nomination, even if you care about non-delegate factors like cumulative popular vote, it really doesn’t matter at all whether one candidate or another “wins” the popular vote in individual states. This isn’t a general election, where a “win” gets you electoral votes. But without question, media coverage of the nominating process has given vast and undeserved attention to this phenomenon, for the obvious reason that it’s “better television” to “call” a state for Clinton or Obama–particularly if it’s an “upset”–than to report the slow, complicated cumulative math of pledged delegates and/or total popular vote. This is probably the price we pay for a system of nominating candidates that’s staged by individual states over a long period of time.
As we get closer to the final decision, however, the math has to take over, and absent some “upset” that’s viewed as a “game-changer,” that’s what seems to be happening in media perceptions today.
So where does that leave us? Assuming she can raise or lend herself enough money to give herself that option, Clinton’s candidacy now comes down to avoiding extinction by superdelegates and party leaders in the hopes that some external event–i.e., a “scandal” or major “gaffe”–will suddenly make Barack Obama look truly unelectable. For that reason, the best indicator to look at from now on is probably not pledged delegates or popular votes, or any particular primary outcome, but general election polls. HRC desperately needs a batch of polls showing that she’d beat John McCain handily while Obama would lose to him by a significant margin. Her campaign may even succeed in convincing superdelegates to hold off on shifting to Obama for a while just to make sure he doesn’t “crater” in general election polls after he’s become the putative nominee. But if such polls don’t give her what she needs (and they haven’t so far), it truly is over, sooner or later.
For history-minded readers, I can recall a precedent for HRC’s situation, way back in 1968, when Nelson Rockefeller (in tacit alliance with Ronald Reagan) launched a late challenge to the nomination of Richard Nixon. Rocky’s whole campaign was about electability: Nixon was famously a loser, and would lose to Hubert Humphrey in November. About a week before the Republican Convention, a major poll came out showing Nixon running better against Humphrey than Rockefeller, instantly croaking Rockefeller’s candidacy and guaranteeing Nixon the nomination. Like Rocky then, Clinton’s fate is now in the hands of the pollsters and the superdelegates and media wizards who consult them.

We try to be even-handed regarding Democratic candidates in the posts we flag for our readers. This morning, however, despite the split decision in IN and NC, it’s hard to find much encouragement for Senator Clinton on the blogosphere or MSM. Some examples:
Reuters political correspondent John Whitesides’s WaPo article cites Obama’s net pick-up of nine delegates is a “big step” towards his winning the nomination.
L.A. Times reporter Mark Z. Barabak says Obama “remains well-positioned to win the nomination…but has not mustered the strength to finish off Clinton.”
Politico‘s Ben Smith says Obama took “a large and potentially decisive step toward the Democratic nomination” with his huge NC win and strong second-place finish in Indiana.
Clinton supporter Todd Beeton’s MyDD post observes with regret “there is no way to spin away what happened tonight: Senator Clinton had a really bad night and Senator Obama had a phenomenal one.”
James A. Barnes of the National Journal Online notes “Nothing short of a sweep in the remaining contests — including Montana, Oregon and South Dakota, where Obama is favored — is likely to alter the view that Obama is the party’s likely nominee and prevent superdelegates from coalescing around him.”
John Nichols’s post in The Nation, “Obama’s Very Good Primary Night” (via Alternet) gives a solid edge to Obama, who added to both his popular and delegate vote totals.
Open Left‘s Chris Bowers argues that the IN and NC primaries were redundant in the sense that the nomination was already pretty much decided, while his Open Left colleague Tremayne believes Tuesday was more significant because the MSM finally gets it that “the math argument is now unassailable.”
Slate‘s John Dickerson says “tough arguments are all that’s left for Clinton since she didn’t get the win she needed.”
The Grey Lady’s Jeff Zeleny sees “a boost of momentum” for Obama and a strengthened case for superdelgate support for the Illinois Senator.
Salon‘s Walter Shapiro says HRC is “one day and two important primaries closer to oblivion.”
Alan Silverleib and Mark Preston of CNN‘s Washington Bureau have a little encouragement for Clinton: “Looking ahead, there are some bright spots for the Clinton campaign. Next week the campaign shifts to West Virginia, where the demographic and socioeconomic terrain ought to favor her. On May 20, the candidates will battle it out in Kentucky and Oregon. Clinton is also expected to do well in Kentucky, while she will try to defy expectations in Oregon. Her support among Hispanics may bode well for her on the June 1st Puerto Rico primary. Two days later, Clinton will battle it out with Obama in Montana and South Dakota — the final two states to weigh in on this marathon primary season. But unless she scores landside victories in the remaining contests, most pundits predict the delegates will be split about evenly”

We at TDS will have plenty to say tomorrow about the NC and IN primary results, and what they mean in terms of the Democratic nominating contest. But for tonight, I just want to note a small curiosity: when’s the last time in a highly competitive contest that one candidate conceded, and another claimed victory, before the networks called the race? That just happened with respect to Indiana, where every network other than CBS (which called it early for HRC) is waiting for the results from Lake County, which Obama is expected to win by a large margin.
The Obama campaign almost certainly doesn’t think it can get enough votes from Lake to completely erase Clinton’s statewide lead. Still, given the importance of an election night victory claim for HRC–which, predictably, she made by quoting Obama’s ill-advised “tiebreaker” comment about IN–you’d think the Obama folks would have used the reticence of the nets to keep the waters muddy until most television viewers had gone to bed. It’s probably another sign, reinforced by the overall “unity” theme of Obama’s NC speech, that they’re focused on ending the nomination contest gracefully. Unless, of course, they’re playing with the idea of some sort of Truman-like “surprise” if Lake somehow pulls out the Hoosier State for them. That’s unlikely, but this has been an unlikely political year, hasn’t it?

This morning, my mom drove out to our rural precinct location on her way to work. She collected her ballot at 7:00, filled it out, and fed it through the voting machine. The polls had opened just 30 minutes before, and there wasn’t a line, but more than 300 people had already voted.
I’m hearing a lot of similar stories when I talk to friends in North Carolina, and the same message is coming from election officials in the state. All the signs indicate that we’re in for a day of record turnout.
That’s unsurprising.
But it means we’re going to be left with some serious questions when the polls close at 7:30 tonight. How long is it going to take for results to be calculated? What are the exit polls going to tell us?
There was a staff post earlier today which linked to a story in The Politico outlining some good places to look for answers. Much of that analysis was really sound, and I’d only add a couple things.
Clinton should do best in the western part of the state, and if election returns come back similarly to how they did in Virginia, that area should report first. Can she build up a lead there that is big enough to cut into Obama’s advantages elsewhere? I’ll be watching the totals in Buncombe county to get an idea for how Clinton should do in the Appalachians.
To get a measure of Obama’s performance, I plan to be watching the vote totals in Durham and Mecklenburg counties, where there is a big African American population and a lot of college educated voters. If turnout in those two counties is in the hundreds of thousands, he’s in for a good night.
One last thing — the State Board of Elections has just upgraded the results page for its website. It’s pretty snazzy.

I’m probably a bit too inclined to criticize political writers who don’t seem to know a lot of political history. Sometimes it’s very relevant, but sometimes not so much: history does get made with each new electoral cycle.
But when a political writer makes a historical claim that’s, well, just not accurate, that’s another whole thing. In a new piece in The New Yorker, Elizabeth Kolbert pens a familiar complaint that Hillary Clinton’s extended challenge to Barack Obama is selfishlessly destructive. But she bases that judgment not just on HRC’s slim prospects for victory, but on the the idea that this kind of late challenge is unprecedented in its defiance of the natural process that quickly crowns front-runners:

Presidential-primary races tend to proceed along self-reflexive lines. The candidate who is ahead—or who is perceived to be—receives more press coverage. He collects more contributions and endorsements, and these generate still more media attention, which brings in more money, more votes, and so on. Meanwhile, his opponents find that they cannot pay their staffs, or afford to hire a bus, or attract more than a clutch of peevish reporters to their news conferences. Hoping to make it onto the short list for Vice-President, the laggards throw their support to the front-runner, and the contest comes to an abrupt, if not necessarily satisfying, close.
Hillary Clinton is perhaps the first candidate in primary history to run this process in reverse. The longer the race has gone on, the lower the odds have become that she will finish the season leading either in the popular vote or in elected delegates…. Nevertheless, rather than growing weaker, she seems to have become more formidable.

You don’t have to go back to the Whigs to assess Kolbert’s assertion that HRC is the “first candidate in primary history” to mount a late, apparently hopeless challenge. The primary-dominated nominating process began in 1972 on the Democratic side, and arguably in 1976 on the Republican side. During that relatively brief period, late primary challenges to the virtually assured nominee occurred among Democrats in 1976, 1980, and 1984, and among Republicans in 1976 and 1980. While the 1976 Democratic challenges by Frank Church and Jerry Brown, and the 1980 Republican challenge by George H.W. Bush, produced mixed results, Reagan ’76, Kennedy ’80, and Hart ’84 represented powerful late-season campaigns that threatened to deny the nomination to the overwhelming front-runner. Kennedy and Hart won particularly impressive late-primary sweeps. And in 1984, the currently notorious Democratic superdelegates made news for the first and last time prior to this year by nailing down Walter Mondale’s nomination in the teeth of a late-primary Hart gale-force wind.
It’s true that none of these late challenges succeeded, and that all of the eventual nominees (other than the slightly threatened Ronald Reagan of 1980) lost the general election. So make what you want of the implications of HRC’s current challenge. But she’s not the first to launch one.

Politico‘s Carrie Budoff Brown has some good tips for getting the early skinny on today’s primary elections in North Carolina and Indiana. For NC Brown advises “keep an eye on Raleigh-Durham area turnout,” which is a quarter to a third of the state-wide turnout. She quotes Morgan Jackson, a North Carolina political consultant, who says if turnout approaches 40 percent, it’s “good news” for Obama. Brown adds:

…Durham, which is 44 percent African American, could provide a gauge on turnout among one of Obama’s most loyal constituencies. Charlotte, Greensboro and Winston-Salem, all at least one-third black, are also worth watching. Obama needs strong turnout in towns with black colleges and universities, such as Elizabeth City in the northeastern corner of the state…
…Kokomo’s Howard County is the bellwether to watch…It is urban and rural, with a mix of African Americans and blue collar workers, some employed in the Chrysler plants…it tends to back the winner in gubernatorial, congressional and state legislative races.

For Indiana, Brown advises monitoring the turnout in Indianapolis, Gary and Bloomington, expected to be Obama strongholds. In terms of overall turnout, Brown says:

Analysts are expecting far bigger turnout this year than in 2004, when about 22 percent of voters cast ballots in the presidential primary, said Russell Hanson, a political science professor at Indiana University-Bloomington…A much bigger turnout is good news for Obama because it means “those who haven’t been politically engaged in the past are coming out,” Hanson said. “If that is not happening, then that is working in Clinton’s favor because the traditional [party] machinery is working.”

All good tips. Check also local television stations, like Raleigh’s WNCN 17 (NBC) and WRAL (CBS). For Indiana, check Indianapolis ABC affiliate WRTV and Fort Wayne’s WKJG (NBC). For newspapers, The Gary Post-Tribune, the Kokomo Tribune and The Charlotte Observer should be good for turnout updates.

In an especially blatant example of a journalist letting himself be used to send up trial balloons for a political campaign, Bill Kristol’s New York Times column today announces that all sorts of people in John McCain’s political operation are thinking fond thoughts about Louisiana Governor Bobby Jindal as a potential running-mate for the Arizonan.
Just to make sure the campaign’s purposes are served in exquisitely nuanced detail, Kristol spends a big chunk of the column making it clear that the Jindal Option will only be considered seriously if (a) Barack Obama is the Democratic nominee, and (b) it appears likely McCain’s going to lose unless he throws something of a Hail Mary pass.
I’ve always thought Bobby Jindal made a lot of sense as a Hail Mary choice for McCain. He’s young (36), but has federal and state experience, without any direct complicity in Bush administration disasters (including Katrina). He’s non-white (Indian-American), but has won statewide in a place not noted for racial tolerance. He’s a Catholic of the particuarly fervid brand characteristic of converts (he was raised as a Hindu). He’s by all accounts crazy smart. And most importantly, serious conservative ideological types adore him, unlike the unconventional veep choice most often mentioned, Condi Rice. As I noted back in February, Jindal was the plurality favorite in a reader survey of McCain running-mate options at National Review Online. So it’s not surprising that the McCain campaign lofted this trial balloon right now, at a comfortable distance from the moment when the veep deal will actually go down.
The most interesting feature of Kristol’s column today is something entirely different: in a piece supposedly about John McCain and Bobby Jindal, Kristol managed to work in eight (8) references to Jeremiah Wright, or roughly seven more than might have been justified by the context. I’m guessing the injunction to repeat Wright’s name to the point of self-parody came to Kristol in the same package of talking points that asked him to see what the chattering classes thought of a McCain-Jindal ticket.

Apropos of Ed’s post below citing the need for systematic reforms of our nominating process before ’12, abolishing the superdelegates or redefining their role and qualifications should top the list. Toward that end, Josh Marshall has an instructive TPM post “Thumb on the Scales” mulling over the history of the superdelegates, which were established in 1982, and he notes:

The more palatable argument was that the superdelegates balanced out the idealism of party activists with the more pragmatic experience of party regulars and elected officials who had experience winning actual elections. But however you argue it, the supers were put there precisely to second-guess the results of the primary and caucus process.
…Indeed, it’s not only that the concept is less palatable today. The sociology of the party is simply different; from the inside I don’t think the party’s critics any longer see its shortcomings in that way. The superdelegate concept was just a bad idea that got kept on the books because it seemed not to have any practical effect other than to give federal officeholders and sundry party bigwigs credentials to attend the conventions.

Marshall also comments on the important distinction between superdelegates who are elected officials, vs. party operatives:

…there are almost 800 superdelegates and they’re divided roughly equally between elected officials and party officials. While I think the superdelegate system should probably be scrapped in its entirety, the rationale for the elected folks is far, far greater than for the party operatives. The electeds are basically every Democratic member of Congress, Democratic governors and then a few miscellaneous folks like ex-presidents, ex-vice presidents and ex-congressional leaders. These folks are actually elected by Democrats on a fairly regular basis. And if they abuse the power they can be held accountable at the ballot box.

I come down with Marshall on the side of getting rid of them before ’12, as a way of making a clean break with the notion that it’s OK to thwart the will of the voters in some circumstances. Getting rid of them altogether would make a simple statement that the 21st century Democratic Party has faith in the decisions of voters. If the Party is going to keep the superdelegates, however, I would agree with Marshall that they should insist that only elected officials, not unelected party operatives, can serve in this capacity.
I can think of only one situation in which the super-d’s can serve democracy in an honorable way: in the event that a candidate gets enough delegates to secure the nomination despite the fact that her/his opponent got more popular votes. This can happen when a candidate loses or wins enough districts by a huge margin, despite having more/less popular votes nation-wide. In that event, the superdelegates could decide to give the nomination to the popular vote winner. But it should be stipulated that the superdelegate designees would be empowered as delegates only when the popular vote winner receives fewer delegate votes.
There are other reforms of the nominating process that merit consideration before ’12, including the primary calendar and possible incentives for caucus states switching to direct primary elections. But abolishing or reforming the outdated superdelegate system should be a simpler, and quicker fix.

As we get ready for another small round of Democratic presidential primaries tomorrow, which are likely to add up to no more than another small accretion of data in the nominating process, it’s not a bad idea to make a large mental note about the need for truly systemic reforms in the system before 2012.
In that connection, RealClearPolitics has published a speech by the excellent Jay Cost which really hits the nail on the head about the basic problem with the current nominating process in both parties:

At its core, the current nomination system is a disjointed hybrid of the old, state party-centered way of choosing nominees and the new way that places power with rank-and-file partisans. The reforms of the 1970s did not amount to root-and-branch changes, but rather 20th century updates to a 19th century system.
Perhaps this accounts for the powerlessness of the national committees. They are tasked with bringing coherence to an incoherent system. I would suggest that whatever changes are made – whether the national parties are strengthened or not – the goal should be to impose coherence of form and purpose. Right now, both processes have one foot in the past and one foot in the present.

That’s exactly right. Whatever you think of the particular strengths and weaknesses of the present method of nominating presidential candidates, no one charged with designing a system de novo would come up with anything like the status quo. At some point, both parties are going to have to decide once and for all whether the nomination of a presidential candidate is a function of the national party or of state parties and state governments. The current system is indeed an incoherent hybrid that is difficult to “reform” in small ways because it represents wildy divergent traditions and impulses.
You’d think that the agonizing if exciting Democratic contest this year would be enough to spur root-and-branch reforms, and maybe it will. But then again, our election administration “system,” another incoherent amalgam of 19th century state-based traditions and 20th century notions of fairness and uniformity, suffers from many of the same problems, as was exposed in the most dramatic fashion possible by the 2000 presidential election. Yet nothing’s really changed since then.
I had to chuckle at one phrase used by Cost in his speech: the Democratic nominating system, he said, is designed to produce “confusion and delay.” As some of you may recognize, this is the horrible judgment meted out on the perenially popular Thomas the Tank Engine children’s TV show for the consequences of mistakes made by its anthropomorphic locomotives. It makes you wonder how many train wrecks we must endure in our electoral system before we finally redesign the tracks.

A host of recent opinion polls indicate that the economy has replaced the war in Iraq as the leading issue of concern for Americans, at least for the time being. While some Republicans may welcome the distraction from the Iraq mess and think they are in safer territory in discussing economic issues, they will find scant comfort in comparing economic performance under Democratic and Republican administrations. To see why, check out this insightful and well-documented eriposte chart (flagged in Rick Perlstein’s current post at Blog for Our Future), comparing economic data under Democratic and Republican presidents. A few examples culled from the chart:

Real Disposable Personal Income Growth per year 1953-2001: D 3.65 %; R 3.08 %
Unemployment 1962-2001: D 5.1%; R 6.75%
GDP growth 1962-2001: D 3.9%; R 2.9%
Inflation 1962-2001: D 4.26%; R 4.96%
Percentage growth in Total Federal Spending 1962-2001: D 6.96%; R 7.57%
Yearly budget deficit 1962-2001: D $36 billion; R $190 billion

Mercifully for the Republicans, economic data from the current Bush Administration is not yet included, since the chart compares completed Administrations.