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The Democratic Strategist

Political Strategy for a Permanent Democratic Majority

Ed Kilgore

Diverging Realities, One Clear Win

The best comment I heard on television last night in the wake of Hillary Clinton’s victory speech in West Virginia was MSNBC’s Keith Olberman, who observed that the Obama and Clinton campaigns has embraced “different realities.”
In Obamaland, the nomination contest is basically over, since HRC would have to win absurdly impossible percentages of the available pledged and unpledged delegates to get a majority. The cumulative popular vote measurement (on which, of course, there is no consensus) is irrelevant even in the unlikely event that HRC catches up by June 3.
In Clintonland, all the superdelegates are still up for grabs, and both pledged delegate and popular vote totals have to include Florida and Michigan.
We’ll see a sharpening of this divergence next Tuesday night, when Obama will claim a majority of total pledged delegates, and quite possibly an overall majority, while Clinton will deny the math on grounds that Florida and Michigan must be factored in, while superdelegate announcements of support aren’t binding.
It’s now up to HRC–with or without a major push from superdelegates and/or from hungry unpaid vendors–to make these realities converge, if and when she chooses.
The one thing virtually all Democrats can agree on today is the significance of the special congressional election in Mississippi yesterday, where Democrat Travis Childers comfortably won a district that George W. Bush carried with 63% in 2004.
In their analysis of the Mississippi results for The Hill, Jackie Kucinich and Bob Cusack summed it up in a way that will make donkeys bray with joy:

The sky is falling on House Republicans and there is no sign of it letting up.
The GOP loss in Mississippi’s special election Tuesday is the strongest sign yet that the Republican Party is in shambles. And while some Republicans see a light at the end of the tunnel, that light more likely represents the Democratic train that is primed to mow down more Republicans in November.


Understanding the White Working Class

This presidential election year has witnessed a revival of interest in the size, nature, and political preferences of the white working class, in both the Democratic nominating contest and in the upcoming general election.
Fortunately, TDS Co-Editor Ruy Teixeira and Emory University professor Alan Abramowitz have published a definitive study on the political demographics of this issue in The Decline of the White Working Class and the Rise of a Mass Upper Middle Class, a Brookings Institution paper.
Teixeira and Abramowitz take a careful, empirically based look at leading definitions of the white working class, its political behavior over time, key geographical variables, and the evidence that particular issues have affected its fragile relationship with the Democratic Party.
This paper would be a “must-read” at any time, but this year, it’s a “really-must-read” paper.


The Piece Still Missing

It’s anybody’s guess at the moment whether Hillary Clinton still really sees a path to the Democratic nomination, or just wants to pick up anticipated wins in West Virginia and Kentucky to increase her convention and general election leverage and then fold her tent. If she does intend to push on until such time as she is mathematically eliminated, her biggest problem now isn’t so much the pledged delegate or popular vote totals, but the strong pressure mounting on superdelegates to wrap this thing up (perhaps, so goes the CW, next Wednesday, when Obama is expected to win in Oregon).
Her strongest argument with the supers right now would be that Obama isn’t electable. I say “would be,” because general election polls continue to show Obama running as well as or better than her against John McCain. The latest, a new ABC/Washington Post survey, shows Obama leading McCain 51-44, while HRC’s lead is 49-46 (it also has Obama with a 12-point national lead over HRC for the Democratic nomination).
Sure, the Clinton campaign can and will make a complicated argument that the battleground-state distribution of her vote in trials against McCain makes her the stronger candidate. But she needs more than that to sway the supers. Clear evidence that she is likely to win, and Obama is likely to lose, against John McCain remains the piece still missing from her case for the nomination.


The “Unity Ticket” Debate

Over at TNR’s The Plank, a variety of people have been invited to debate about the advisability of an Obama-Clinton “unity ticket.” As it happens, Alan Wolfe and yours truly were the first to send in submissions, both supporting the “unity ticket.”
I tried to be sensitive to the various arguments against the “unity ticket,” especially those of Obama supporters who view this possibility as a self-repudiation of Obama’s message and the very rationale for his candidacy. I also made it clear there are plenty of practical obstacles to an Obama-Clinton collaboration, most notably the fact that we don’t know if either principal is open to it at all.
But in the end, my own conclusion was that a unity ticket would most efficiently resolve the candidate-centered divisions in the Democratic Party that have grown ever more apparent as the primary contest has dragged on, allowing the party to briskly move on to a tough general election campaign. I’m sure other participants in the debate will argue otherwise, and as always in these extracurricular essays, I was speaking for myself, not TDS.


Mood Swings

It’s been a crazy 18 hours or so in the Democratic presidential contest. The early take on the impact of yesterday’s primaries was that both candidates had lost the opportunity for a big victory, with HRC once again avoiding disaster by narrowly winning Indiana. As the staff post this morning showed, however, the media narrative quickly shifted to one of gloom and doom for Clinton. And Matt Compton was probably right in suggesting that a stampede of network pundits led by Tim Russert’s midnight declaration that Obama had won the nomination was largely responsible for this dramatic mood swing.
As a skeptic about the almighty power of the punditocracy to dictate political developments, my attitude today has been: Show me the superdelegates! Maybe Matt’s right that the trickle of new superdelegate endorsements for Obama (see his Update below) could soon become an irresistable tide. We’ll probably know within another day or two if the Supers are going to end this thing, or hold off for a while to see if Obama commits some terrible error that reinforces the Clinton campaign’s implicit claim that he’s unelectable. And as Matt points out, there are tactical reasons why the Obama campaign might want HRC to stay in the race until May 20.
But if superdelegates and party leaders decide, for whatever reason, to let the competition go on, I strongly suspect they are letting the Clinton campaign know it’s time to be very careful about criticizing Obama. If he commits some grievous mistake, or if something politically damaging about him suddenly emerges, I don’t think HRC is going to be in a position to “pile on” as she did with Rev. Wright or the “bitter-gate” controversy. Democrats are worried about the general election, and while that worry is the last, best hope of the Clinton campaign, she can no longer risk feeding that mood directly.


HRC’s Final Hope: General Election Polls

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.


A Small Curiosity

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?


Late Primary Challenges: Not Unprecedented

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.


The Jindal Trial Balloon

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.


Confusion and Delay

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.