It’s still too soon to know if actual voters will care about this, but the Rev. Jeremiah Wright’s self-exculpatory publicity offensive (encompassing, so far, a PBS intervew with Bill Moyers, a speech to an NAACP gathering, and a National Press Club appearance) is clearly not good news for the campaign of Barack Obama. The Right is in full cry over it. Progressives seem divided over how they and/or Obama should respond, if at all. And Hillary Clinton’s campaign, while officially quiet on the latest Wright controversy, will obviously exploit it under if not over the radar screen in NC and IN.
The timing couldn’t be much worse for Obama; he’s locked into a close race in IN; his lead in NC (where HRC just obtained the endorsement of Gov. Mike Easley, a guy popular with conservative white voters in the state) may be shrinking. Worse still, though it could be an outlier, there’s finally a national general election poll (AP/Ipsos) that provides some evidence for Hillary Clinton’s relentless argument to superdelegates that she’s more electable than Obama (it has her up 9 points over McCain, while Obama’s lead is 2 points).
Perhaps the worst thing for Obama is that the Wright furor appears to be beyond his control at present. He’s already done one “big speech” on the subject. His efforts to make his relationship with the theoretically-retired Wright a thing of the past have been completely blown up by Wright’s highly visible re-emergence. It’s reasonably clear that Wright, who obviously feels he has bigger fish to fry than just some presidential election, may not relinquish the spotlight any time soon. And since the main impact of Wright’s latest remarks–particularly at the Press Club–is to reinforce some of his most controversial past statements, it will be difficult for Obama to act as though something new has happened that requires a different response than his denounce-not-renounce posture in his “big speech.”
Maybe it will blow over in a day or two. Maybe the excitement of the chattering classes over Wright will once again prove to be less than communicable to voters. Maybe Obama will even benefit from some sympathy at his plight, or from a long-overdue media scrutiny of John McCain’s much larger group of nutty clerical supporters. And maybe he’ll follow Todd Gitlin’s advice and take on his pastor as a man who’s crossed the line from prophetic courage to self-Wrighteous narcissism.
None of this brouhaha, BTW, changes the relentless mathematics that makes Obama’s nomination likely no matter what happens next Tuesday in IN and NC.
But at a time when Barack Obama wants voters to focus on his economic views, it’s the wrong time for Wright to crash back onto the national stage.

One of the big cookie-cutter trends in recent Republican governance at the state level has been the imposition of photo ID requirements for voting, rationalized by entirely unsubstantiated “concerns” about voter fraud. Today the U.S. Supreme Court, in a complicated 6-3 decision with multiple opinions, upheld one of the toughest photo ID laws, that of Indiana.
The basic impact of this decision is to place the burden of proof on those potentially affected by photo ID laws to demonstrate discriminatory impact, while relieving the state of any real obligation to demonstrate actual or potential “fraud.” Evidence of partisan intent in enacting such laws isn’t, apparently, relevant.
Rick Hasen of Election Law Blog has a full analysis, which emphasizes that the nature of the decision will encourage future litigation, and also notes the stubborn refusal of the Court to examine the implications of its own intervention in state election laws in Bush v. Gore.
But Hasen also has a comment about Justice Scalia’s concurring opinion in the current case that deserves some attention, particularly from those Democrats and independents who look with equanimity towards a McCain presidency:

Justice Scalia’s opinion (joined by Justices Alito and Thomas) concurring in the judgment is uncharacteristically brief. It reads the applicable constitutional standard differently, one that simply gives carte blanche to most states to pass laws with any kind of neutral justification offered. It is unclear to me…whether Justice Scalia would today uphold a poll tax like that struck down by the Court in Harper. Certainly Justice Scalia seems to think that if a law doesn’t burden most people, it should be upheld unless it imposes a “severe and overall” burden on the right to vote.

In this and many other constitutional areas, Scalia’s radicalism could well become Court doctrine if a Republican president gets to appoint a couple of Justices. For all of John McCain’s alleged “moderation” and “maverick” character, he’s never once departed from conservative orthodoxy on Supreme Court nominations. And here’s what he’s said about his own inclinations as a potential president:

On the issue of appointments to the Supreme Court, McCain mentioned that Sam Brownback would play an advisory role in helping decide who he should nominate for the Supreme Court. As models of who he would select, John McCain pointed to Justices Samuel Alito and Antonin Scalia.

More importantly, the “consolidation of the conservative base” that McCain has been undertaking since he nailed down the Republican presidential nomination depends very heavily on implicit and explicit promises to give conservatives an aggressively counter-revolutionary Court–the overriding goal, in particular, of Right To Lifers and other cultural conservatives. Scalia is their ideal Justice, and today’s suggestion that a Court made over in his image might look indifferently towards a reimposition of poll taxes is the kind of thing that pro-McCain Democrats and independents need to be reminded of constantly.

Pollster.com’s Mark Blumenthal does us all an important service today by evaluating and rejecting the idea that the consistent over-estimation of Barack Obama’s vote in early (i.e., unadjusted to reflect actual voting) exit polls is explained by the so-called Bradley-Wilder Effect–the reluctance of interviewees to admit they are going to vote against an African-American candidate.
As Blumental points out, the BWE, if it exists at all, is more likely to occur when voters are actually interviewed, especially “live” and in person. But exit polling is relatively private–voters are handed a questionnaire and allowed to fill it out and deposit it in a box, just like secret-ballot voting itself. So if the BWE is truly a significant factor, a pro-Obama bias would be showing up in pre-election polls as much as or more than in exit polls, and that hasn’t been the case other than in isolated instances (e.g., NH).
This matters because a widespread belief in the BWE might well lead observers to discount Obama’s standing in general election trial heats against John McCain.
But Blumenthal’s alternative explanation of the pro-Obama bias in exit polls is interesting as well: he attributes it to the same exit polling bias in favor of younger voters that was generally accepted as the reason for the pro-Kerry inaccuracy of the initial 2004 general election exit polls. This bias was supposedly addressed and dealt with after those elections, so it’s re-emergence today is certainly annoying if nothing else. Or maybe I’m just reacting as one of those Democrats who saw the early exits in 2004 and spent much of the evening calling friends and family to tell them to ignore the red sea on network election maps, because I “knew” Kerry had actually won.

In my last post, I should have probably said a bit more about Noam Scheiber’s “Rendell Factor” theory about Barack Obama’s poor performance in certain Philadelphia suburbs. The theory is weakened by the fact that Obama beat Clinton two-to-one in Rendell’s home base, Philadelphia County (where Philly Mayor Michael Nutter’s endorsement didn’t cut much ice for HRC, either). Indeed, there’s not much evidence that endorsements in PA carried a whole lot of weight. After all, Obama’s marquee supporter, Sen. Bob Casey, Jr., is from Lackawanna County, which Clinton won with a crushing 74% of the vote.

There are two online articles today that take a closer look at the PA Democratic primary results, and even though they begin with different questions, obtain a similar answer.
TNR’s Noam Scheiber wants to know more about Barack Obama’s spotty performance in the Philadelphia suburbs, which surprised a lot of non-PA observers. He comes up with a couple of explanations, and this is the one I found particularly interesting:

Obama tends to win the counties that are either strongly Republican (like Lancaster) or strongly Democratic (like Delaware, or Philadelphia itself), while Hillary tends to do better in counties that are either narrowly Republican or narrowly Democratic—and, within that band, the more Democratic the better. Which makes sense. The narrowly Democratic counties have strong Democratic parties and are therefore places where [Gov. Ed] Rendell’s help would have really mattered.

Noam’s guess that relative weakness of the Rendell organization explains Obama’s relatively strong performance in heavily Republican Philly suburbs may be plausible, but we’ve seen this pattern before.
That brings me to Jay Cost’s article at RealClearPolitics. Jay does a careful and complex comparison of the vote in Ohio and Pennsylvania counties, and discovers, to his own surprise, that Barack Obama actually did better than expected in central Pennslyvania, and not just in university towns like State College.

[It] is noteworthy that central Pennsylvania is the most Republican part of the state. We have found again and again in this primary season that, outside of the South, white Democrats in heavily Republican areas tend to prefer Obama more than other areas. It is unclear what has caused this trend, but the observations in central Pennsylvania are consistent with it.

While Jay doesn’t get into explanations of the phenomenon in his article, it’s worth noting that in this state at least, it’s probably not attributable to tactical voting by Republicans, or to the legendary Republican Hillary-hatred. PA held a closed primary, and moreover, it’s not one of those EZ-Re-Registration states where GOPers can stroll to the polls and become a Democrat-For-A-Day. Something else is going on here, and as Jay notes, it’s a national pattern, at least outside the South.
Obama-skeptics rightly point out the general-election irrelevance of his primary and caucus strength in “Republican states.” But they sometimes forget that there are “Republican areas” in battleground states, and that in the end, a vote is a vote.

The hard time that Barack Obama’s had in “closing the deal” with primary voters has quite naturally raised the volume of various “electability” arguments about both Democratic candidates, some sound, some not so sound.
It’s important to begin by noting that the most objective (if grossly premature) evidence is in general election head-to-head polls. RealClearPolitics’ summary of recent Obama/McCain and Clinton/McCain national trial heats includes eight April surveys. Obama and McCain are tied in three, and Obama leads in the other five by margins ranging from one to five percent. Clinton and Obama are also tied in two polls, but the rest are all over the place, with Clinton up in three by margins ranging from three to six percent, and McCain leading in three by margins ranging from two to five percent. Overall, these polls are pretty much a wash between the two Democrats, and close to a wash with McCain. They certainly don’t exhibit the catastropic weakness some are attributing to Barack Obama.
Aside from general election polls, the main intra-Democratic electability arguments revolve around various extrapolations of primary results to the general election. And that’s where things start getting a little irrational.
As Noam Scheiber explains today at TNR’s The Stump:

[The] relevant question isn’t: Which demographic groups is each candidate winning the primary? The relevant question is: Which candidate is most likely to win the general-election version of their primary coalition (assuming they more or less hang on to the Democratic supporters of their primary opponent)?
In concrete terms, Hillary’s primary coalition consists of working-class people, seniors, and women. Obama’s consists of African-Americans, younger voters, and affluent/educated voters. Set aside African-Americans, who aren’t really a swing group. The question then becomes: 1.) How likely is Hillary to win non-Democratic working-class people, non-Democratic seniors, and non-Democratic women? 2.) How likely is Obama to win non-Democratic young people and non-Democratic affluent/ educated people?

Historically, primary strengths and weaknesses are not necessarily transmittable to general elections. As Matt Yglesias reminds us, Al Gore and John Kerry were essentially the “beer track” candidates in their nomination struggles with Bill Bradley and Howard Dean. They famously struggled to compete with George W. Bush among white-working-class voters in the general election (though both did, BTW, carry the lunch-bucket states of Pennsylvania and Michigan).
You can certainly argue that there are things about Barack Obama that will make him a difficult sale to white working-class voters in a general election, just as Hillary Clinton may have some problems with upscale “reform-oriented” independents. But that’s simply not self-evident from primary voting patterns.

Hillary Clinton has followed up her solid primary win in PA yesterday with what appears to be a tactical victory today: laying down a story-line that the only contest that matters on May 6 is in Indiana, a state she has a decent chance of winning, making NC, where Obama has a big lead in the polls, essentially meaningless.
I call it a success because so far, the news media, and even some pro-Obama commentators, are buying it. In the midst of a generally negative assessment of Clinton’s ultimate, today’s Washington Post article by Dan Balz on the PA results says this:

Clinton expects victories in West Virginia, Kentucky and Puerto Rico. Obama’s team expects to win Oregon, North Carolina, Montana, South Dakota and Guam. That makes Indiana the critical battleground. Obama was there last night and Clinton will arrive today.

Even more interestingly, Ezra Klein of the American Prospect–who usually reflects the pro-Obama leanings of the progressive blogosphere–has an article up today arguing that Obama needs a “knockout” over Clinton on May 6, meaning an Indiana win.
And the articles discussed here at TDS by J.P. Green earlier today all point to Indiana as the next big contest.
Implicit and sometimes explicit in the all-about-Indiana story-line is that Barack Obama can’t claim true and final victory in the nominating contest–delegate-math be damned–until he can finally exorcise the haunting fear that he can’t win states with substantial but not massive African-American populations. And that’s a concern for him beyond Indiana, if he loses there: if the contest is still alive, HRC is almost certainly going to win big in WV and KY, and Obama’s subsequent likely wins in MT, SD and perhaps OR may be written off as irrelevant to his “problem,” which superdelegates will be constantly asked to weigh.
Part of Obama’s current dilemma is that his own campaign can’t seem to get beyond an inevitability argument. Brandishing projected delegate and popular-vote charts, the Obama campaign and its media allies have been dismissing adverse primary results for weeks and even months now, on the reasonable but probably irrelevant theory that it would take a miracle for Clinton to catch him on either measurement. If he’s already won, then it’s psychologically difficult to lay down his own marker for when superdelegates should force Clinton from the race–e.g., the next time she loses, say, in NC.
So: Clinton gets to call the next “meaningful” battle, and thus gets to lose NC with no consequences beyond whatever net gains in delegates or popular votes Obama can squeeze from the Tar Heel State. Those gains would simply represent a small addition to the charts showing Obama’s inevitability, which much of the media and a critical mass of superdelegates have clearly decided to reject for now.
It was particularly crafty of the Clinton camp to get word out today that key supporters close to the candidate would gently push her to withdraw if she loses Indiana–a pretty empty pledge since no one thinks she could survive a loss there. No such promises were made with respect to a loss in NC.
When I called this framing of the contest a “tactical” victory for Clinton, I did mean just that. Obama can take the bait and win Indiana and not only nail down the nomination, but quiet some of the caterwauling about his “weaknesses.” Perhaps a NC win would add just enough to the inevitability argument to begin to tip superdelegates in his direction even if he loses Indiana. And in the end, the math that underlies the Obama inevitability argument is generally sound; something other than occasional must-win victories would have to happen to give HRC a plausible shot at the nomination.
But the chance to pick the battleground remains a precious asset to Clinton, and one rarely available to a trailing candidate.

If you are curious about the accuracy of all the comparisons last night between Hillary Clinton’s wins in PA and OH, check out Jay Cost’s article in RealClearPolitics this morning. As he demonstrates in category after category, the two candidates performed roughly the same in the two states. If anything, PA’s primary electorate turned out to be somewhat older, whiter, and more Catholic than OH’s, which helped Clinton. Her margins among white woman and white men actually dropped a bit in PA, but they represented a slightly larger percentage of the vote than in OH.
Here’s Cost’s bottom-line take:

What we see, then, is what we have seen again and again in this contest. Clinton continues to do well with “downscale” whites. Obama does well with “upscale” whites and African Americans. What is intriguing about this result is not just that it is similar to Ohio – but also that it is similar after seven weeks and millions of dollars in campaign expenditures. Clearly, these voting groups are entrenched.

I’d add another factor: as Cost himself demonstrated during the last round of primaries, there’s no real evidence that either candidate has enjoyed much of a “bounce” from winning any given contest, with the sole exception of Obama’s Wisconsin victory, which seems to have been influenced by his Potomac Primary sweep. So if demographics are indeed destiny in this nominating contest, HRC’s got an steep uphill climb in NC but a much better chance in IN. “Momentum,” negative or positive, doesn’t seem to matter to Democratic voters this year. But nor do gross ratings points of advertising bought. That’s the bad and good news for HRC right now.

With the vote nearly all in from PA, it looks like Hillary Clinton will get her double-digit win, just barely (55-45). She’ll also get a bit over a 200,000 popular vote margin, which will cut Obama’s cumulative popular vote lead (excluding four caucus states, plus MI and FL) to about a half million.
The county map for PA looks a lot like OH’s–a few urban pockets going for Obama, and everything else going for HRC. Her wins in two Philadelphia suburban counties (Bucks by a landslide and Montgomery by a whisker) will get some post-election attention, along with her 74% victory in perennial NE PA general election bellweather Lackawanna County.
Since my earlier post mentioned Howard Fineman’s theory that Obama’s real strategy in PA was to spend HRC into bankruptcy, it’s worth noting that she seems to be raising some serious money online tonight. But the real question is whether PA will give her enough money or votes to survive May 6, when she must win Indiana and may need an upset win in NC.

Well, the nets have now called PA for Hillary Clinton, and the final (unadjusted) exits are out, and it looks like her margin of victory will fall into that ambiguous territory of high single-digits (53-47 or 54-46), thought that could change. The exits themselves are not terribly surprising, given past patterns; the most striking numbers to me were her better-than-two-to-one wins in the perpetual battleground territory of NE PA, and also among Catholics. For Obama, the most impressive numbers were his tie with HRC among voters under retirement age, and his 3-2 margin among new Democratic voters (including first-time voters and party-switchers).
HRC’s three-to-two margin among white voters in PA is one of those numbers that can be read either way.
So: let the spin wars begin.