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.
One comment on “Hillary Hits Her Mark”
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Given the wide variety of methods used to choose delegate in the Democratic primary (open primary election, closed primary election, caucuses, and even a mixture of these methods within the same state), how can we determine an accurate popular vote total? If the Democratic party had a national primary election in all states on the same day, with the same rules regarding party registration for participation in each state, then the popular vote total would be meaningful.
Changing from a primary open to all registered voters to a closed primary where only voters registered as Democrats can participate, for example, has a significant impact on the total number of votes cast for each candidate. Likewise, changing from a primary election where voters have 12 hours to cast their ballots to a caucus where voters must arrive at a specific time would change the total number of votes cast. And Mr. Kilgore states that vote totals are not even available for several caucus states. Voter participation levels would also be different for an election held on a Tuesday in January in New Hampshire compared to an election held on a Saturday in May in Guam due to such factors as weather and work schedules.
The presidential nominee will be chosed by delegates at the national convention in Denver. When Sen. Clinton or Sen. Obama can win the support of a sufficient number of delegates, then she or he will be the nominee.
I understand that focusing attention on the “popular vote total” is an attempt by Sen. Clinton’s campaign to persuade undeclared superdelegates that she deserves the nomination. Because of the diversity of election and caucus rules and primary election dates, I would argue that the “popular vote total” is an arbitrary, and therefore meaningless, number.
This year’s big media narrative has been the confirmation saga of Neera Tanden, Biden’s nominee for director of the Office of Management and Budget. At New York I wrote about how over-heated the talk surrounding Tanden has become.
Okay, folks, this is getting ridiculous. When a vote in the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee on the nomination of Neera Tanden was postponed earlier this week, you would have thought it presented an existential threat to the Biden presidency. “Scrutiny over Tanden’s selection has continued to build as the story over her uneven reception on Capitol Hill stretched through the week,” said one Washington Post story. Politico Playbook suggested that if Tanden didn’t recover, the brouhaha “has the potential to be what Biden might call a BFD.” There’sbeen all sorts of unintentionally funny speculation about whether the White House is playing some sort of “three-dimensional chess” in its handling of the confirmation, disguising a nefarious plan B or C.
Perhaps it reflects the law of supply and demand, which requires the inflation of any bit of trouble for Biden into a crisis. After all, his Cabinet nominees have been approved by the Senate with a minimum of 56 votes; the second-lowest level of support was 64 votes. One nominee who was the subject of all sorts of initial shrieking, Tom Vilsack, was confirmed with 92 Senate votes. Meanwhile, Congress is on track to approve the largest package of legislation moved by any president since at least the Reagan budget of 1981, with a lot of the work on it being conducted quietly in both chambers. Maybe if the bill hits some sort of roadblock, or if Republican fury at HHS nominee Xavier Becerra (whose confirmation has predictably become the big fundraising and mobilization vehicle for the GOP’s very loud anti-abortion constituency) reaches a certain decibel level, Tanden can get out of the spotlight for a bit.
But what’s really unfair — and beyond that, surreal — is the extent to which this confirmation is being treated as more important than all the others combined, or indeed, as a make-or-break moment for a presidency that has barely begun. It’s not. If Tanden cannot get confirmed, the Biden administration won’t miss a beat, and I am reasonably sure she will still have a distinguished future in public affairs (though perhaps one without much of a social-media presence). And if she is confirmed, we’ll all forget about the brouhaha and begin focusing on how she does the job, which she is, by all accounts, qualified to perform.
Given the wide variety of methods used to choose delegate in the Democratic primary (open primary election, closed primary election, caucuses, and even a mixture of these methods within the same state), how can we determine an accurate popular vote total? If the Democratic party had a national primary election in all states on the same day, with the same rules regarding party registration for participation in each state, then the popular vote total would be meaningful.
Changing from a primary open to all registered voters to a closed primary where only voters registered as Democrats can participate, for example, has a significant impact on the total number of votes cast for each candidate. Likewise, changing from a primary election where voters have 12 hours to cast their ballots to a caucus where voters must arrive at a specific time would change the total number of votes cast. And Mr. Kilgore states that vote totals are not even available for several caucus states. Voter participation levels would also be different for an election held on a Tuesday in January in New Hampshire compared to an election held on a Saturday in May in Guam due to such factors as weather and work schedules.
The presidential nominee will be chosed by delegates at the national convention in Denver. When Sen. Clinton or Sen. Obama can win the support of a sufficient number of delegates, then she or he will be the nominee.
I understand that focusing attention on the “popular vote total” is an attempt by Sen. Clinton’s campaign to persuade undeclared superdelegates that she deserves the nomination. Because of the diversity of election and caucus rules and primary election dates, I would argue that the “popular vote total” is an arbitrary, and therefore meaningless, number.