An aspect of the Democratic presidential contest that’s rapdily become accepted by both campaigns and most independent observers is that neither Clinton nor Obama is likely to nail down the nomination solely on the basis of pledged delegates awarded after primaries and caucuses. In a close race, that’s hardly surprising, since 19% of the convention votes are reserved for unpledged “superdelegates.”
Thus, technically, we are going to have a “brokered convention” in the limited sense that no one’s probably going to Denver with 2,025 pledged delegates. But obviously, if either candidate has a clear majority of both pledged delegates and of superdelegates, he or she will be the putative nominee, and the convention won’t be “brokered” in any meaningful sense.
There is at present a fair amount of disagreement about pledged delegate totals for each candidate, but that’s only because different observers use different assumptions about delegates “won” in primaries or especially caucuses, but not yet formally selected. Pretty soon, those counts will begin to solidify and converge.
But the picture is more complicated with superdelegates, whose allegiances can only be deduced from individual public statements and/or private commitments.
The Democratic Convention Watch blog has focused on this problem obsessively, and is independently trying to push superdelegates to declare or undeclare themselves unambiguously. At present, however, superdelgate counts diverge significantly. DCW itself has Clinton up 233-147. CNN has her up 234-156; CBS says it’s 210-142, and AP has it at 242-163. That’s a variation of 32 votes for HRC, and 21 votes for Obama.
Meanwhile, there’s a different sort of superdelegate tracking under way at OpenLeft, which has announced a “Superdelegate Tranparency Project” aimed at publicizing the primary and caucus vote preferences of each superdelegate’s constituency. The explicit goal of this project is to reduce the possibility that superdelegates will “overturn” a popular vote mandate for one of the two candidates. But since superdelegates are not apportioned according to any purely representative formula, it’s not clear to me, at least, that if every single one of them “deferred” to his or her “constituency’s” wishes, it would necessarily add up to agreement between superdelegates as a whole and pledged delegates as a whole.
That’s how murky this whole process has become, folks.
In the end, the whole problem would likely resolve itself if one candidate or the other got on a late “roll” in primaries and caucuses, won a comfortable majority of pledged delegates, and then enjoyed a stampede of support from superdelegates. But if that doesn’t happen, tracking superdelegates will become a major cottage industry.

As you probably know if you’re reading political blogs at this time of night, Barack Obama is romping to a big win in VA, winning (according to exit polls) nearly half the white vote, a majority of the Hispanic vote, and all but one region of the state (the rural western region going for HRC).
And John McCain has held off a tough challenge from Mike Huckabee in VA.
But there’s good news for all Democrats, including HRC supporters, in VA.
For one thing, Democratic turnout is running at nearly double the Republican turnout–in a state that hasn’t voted for a Democratic presidential candidate since LBJ in 1964.
And for another, independents, who could vote in either primary, appear to have chosen Democratic ballots by nearly a two-to-one margin as well. And here’s the surprising thing: independents voting in the GOP primary spurned supposed indie-magnet McCain, going for Huckabee by a 43-34 margin, with Ron Paul pulling in 19 percent.

One of the most commonly heard concerns among Democrats these days is that the close race between Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama will divide the party and sink it in November. So it was nice to read (via Daily Kos’ DemFromCT) this very different assessment of the meaning of the Democratic competition in the conservative Wall Street Journal:

For Republican strategists and leaders, facing divisions over presumptive nominee John McCain, the Arizona senator, and demoralized over President Bush’s and the party’s unpopularity, the potency of both Democrats’ candidacies is both fearsome and impressive.
“The Obama wave is unlike anything I have seen during my career. It would have totally swamped any traditional candidate,” said Republican pollster Bill McInturff, who conducts The Wall Street Journal/NBC News polls with Democratic pollster Peter Hart. “The fact that Clinton is still standing and breaking even is actually a remarkable statement about how unique a candidate she is and what an exceptionally strong candidate.”

The title of the piece (by Jackie Calmes) is pretty reassuring, too: “Obama’s Extraordinary Wave Fails To Sink Extraordinary Foe.”
Now everbody can return to their regularly scheduled arguments about one candidate’s superior “electability” over the other, and regularly scheduled handwringing about the duration of this nomination contest.

Since it’s probably just a matter of time until John McCain wins the Republican presidential nomination, it’s not too early to speculate about his vice-presidential choice. And as Alan Abramowitz notes in the last post, McCain has some serious party unity problems.
Some non-Republican media types seem to think it’s obvious that McCain should go ahead and give Huckabee the veep nod, getting him out of the race and providing a congressional/gubernatorial, secular moderate/Christian conservative ticket balance. They do not reckon with the power of the Republican Conservative Establishment, which is much more formidable than any counterpart on the Democratic side. Uniting the Wall Street, K Street, Neocon and Theocon factions of the GOP, and broadcasting its views through the airwaves and blogosphere, this establishment dislikes Huckabee as much as or more than McCain. Whatever its theoretical electoral value, a Mac/Huck ticket would tear the fragile coalition that Bush and Rove built entirely apart. So it probably ain’t going to happen.
A Staff post the other day noted that the moneyed wing of the GOP, represented by the Club for Growth (or as Huckabee calls it, the “Club for Greed”), had weighed in with some suggestions for McCain’s running mate. A more interesting discussion is under way at National Review Online, where Lisa Schiffren reports on responses to an informal query about Veep possibilities at NRO’s blog The Corner.
The top vote getter there was newly elected Louisiana Governor Bobby Jindal, who is an Indian-American and an adult convert from Hinduism to Catholicism. After promoting MN’s Tim Pawlenty, SC’s Mark Sanford, and CA’s Chris Cox for the veepship, Schiffren also mentions Alaska governor Sarah Palin, touted as a member of “Feminists for Life” and also as a former Miss Alaska.
Schiffren’s list shows how seriously conservatives are taking their various economic and cultural litmus tests for the national ticket–and also how far they may be willing to go to accept demographically unconventional candidates like Jindal and Palin who meet those litmus tests. Then again, the best bet for McCain’s running-mate is some white guy in a suit who satisfies the various conservative factions, and adds nothing to the ticket other than a tentative unity and the certainty that the Right will control the party, if not the country.

This weekend’s presidential primary and caucus results are in, and on the Democratic side, Barack Obama won all of the contests: the caucuses in NE, WA, Virgin Islands and ME, and the primary in LA. But given the Democratic proportional delegate selection rules, his “sweep” was not, of course, that absolute. According to Democratic Convention Watch, Obama won 111 pledged delegates to Clinton’s 54. That site now shows Obama ahead in pledged delegates by a margin of 73–968 to 895–with HRC still ahead by 30–1109 to 1079–when unpledged but declared superdelegates are added in.
To show how close and uncertain the contest has become, another credible source, RealClearPolitics, has Obama up by 3–1137 to 1134–in total delegates, with Obama enjoying a 77-vote lead among pledged delegates. With Obama favored in Tuesday’s so-called Potomac Primaries, the odds are reasonably high that he’ll be ahead in both pledged and total delegates in virtually everybody’s assessment by Wednesday, but with a bunch of delegate-rich contests still to come (including several where HRC is currently favored).
On the Republican side, Mike Huckabee came close to his own weekend sweep, crushing John McCain in the KS caucuses; winning a plurality of the vote in the LA primary; and running a close second in the WA caucuses. Unfortunately for him, LA GOP rules deny any delegates to a primary “winner” who fails to win a majority; a state convention will elect the delegates. And in WA, state Republican officials halted the caucus count at 87% of the vote in, with McCain hanging onto a narrow lead (Huck sent lawyers up to Seattle to challenge this decision, and the count has apparently been resumed).
The good news for McCain is that he’s steadily moving up towards the delegate totals needed to win the nomination, even if he keeps “losing” to Huckabee. The bad news for McCain is that conservative resistence to his nomination has not abated; in WA, where he seems to have “won,” 74% of caucus-goers voted for somebody else, including candidates who have withdrawn from the race. Indeed, it was a really bad sign for McCain that after his appearance at last week’s Conservative Political Action Committee meeting, and after Romney withdrew from the race and called for a unified effort behind McCain, CPAC’s straw poll was won by–Romney.
UPCATEGORY: Democratic Strategist

Over at OpenLeft, Chris Bowers offers a nice summary of what we know and what we don’t know about the nine caucuses and primaries being held between tomorrow and next Tuesday in the Democratic presidential race. That’s right, nine: (WA, LA, NE and the Virgin Islands tomorrow; ME on Sunday; and Democrats Abroad, MD, DC and VA on Tuesday).
Obama is the favorite in most of these states, based on different factors (e.g., polls in WA, MD and VA; caucus savvy in WA, NE and ME; and African-American voting strength in Virgin Islands, LA and DC). But as Chris notes, HRC could win a state or two, and in any event, the proportional delegate rules will probably keep Obama from piling up enough pledged delegates to overtake Clinton’s total delegate lead (counting superdelegates). If that’s the case, the growing argument as to whether superdelegates should decide this thing or instead defer to the judgment of voters by following the lead of pledged delegates nationally, pledged delegates in their own state, or actual votes cast in either one, will intensify.

With all the obsessive attention being given to the extraordinarily intense presidential contest, we can all be forgiven if we sometimes forget there’s a congressional campaign underway as well. But Democracy Corps and Greenberg Quinlan Rosner Research have been regularly polling competitive House districts, and their latest analysis suggests that 2008 could be as big a Democratic “wave” election as 2006.
The DCorps analysis is based on a survey that focused strictly on 40 Republican-controlled House districts. In half of them, Democrats have a distinct advantage, as measured by generic ballot support, attitudes towards the parties, favoribility ratings for the incumbent, and all sorts of issue and message testing. And in the other half, Republican incumbents are holding on by their fingernails. In general:

Republican incumbents in this battleground are remarkably weak. They hold a 41 percent approval rating and a net favorability significantly below the national average (just +4 compared to +15). Republican incumbents are even vulnerable in exurban and rural-small town districts, where their approval rating stands below the 40 percent mark and the change and anti-Washington climate is very strong.

As DCorps has argued for many months, Democrats can consolidate their congressional election advantage if and only if they represent a credible agenda for change:

The electorate in this Republican battleground is thirsty for change and their frustrations are driven largely by rising gas prices and global warming, a sense of a lack of accountability in government and an endless war that is costing us billions. Democrats are well positioned to represent the change that voters want in each of these areas.

Since Democrats are already poised to pick up a signficant number of seats in the U.S. Senate, the DCorps analysis indicates that if our candidate can win the White House, she or he (or if this somehow suggests a candidate bias, “he or she”) will have a fighting chance to break the current gridlock and get some serious things done.

In my last post, I talked about Mitt Romney having a tough decision between going medieval on John McCain at today’s CPAC conference, or slowly beginning to fold his tent. Little did I know that the Mittster would use the speech to fold right now.
This should eliminate any lingering doubt about McCain’s nomination. Presumably Mike Huckabee will hang around the campaign trail for a while to see what he can do in a one-on-one with McCain; it’s not like he’s ever counted on fundraising or poll numbers to sustain his candidacy. But it really does mean that many of the conservative disparagers of McCain are going to have to make up their minds pretty fast about where they stand; most of them (particularly in the Grover Norquist/K Street wing of the party) dislike Huckabee as much as or more than McCain.
Nobody’s going to pay much attention to anything else Romney says at CPAC, but you should give his text a gander; whatever his actual views, Romney certainly has internalized the conservative world-view at its most lurid. Did you know that we’ll all soon be broke if the godless baby-killing, gay-loving, porn-watching liberals win this election? That’s the thrust of Mitt’s remarks, centering on the clear example of Europe, where it appears mass starvation is just around the corner:

Europe is facing a demographic disaster. That is the inevitable product of weakened faith in the Creator, failed families, disrespect for the sanctity of human life and eroded morality. Some reason that culture is merely an accessory to America’s vitality; we know that it is the source of our strength.

So, ironically, Mitt Romney has become adept at the rhetoric of squaring God with Mammon just as his odd presidential bid comes to a close. At least he has made one genuine nod towards “strong families” by saving some of his children’s inheritance–assuming us godless liberals don’t tax it away.

It should be an interesting day in Washington at the annual meeting of the Conservative Political Action Committee, that hardy redoubt of the Hard Right. The big event is at 3:00 p.m., EST, when John McCain addresses the group. At last year’s CPAC gathering, McCain was the one GOP presidential candidate who didn’t bother to show up (even Rudy Giuliani appeared in order to bend the knee); every reference to him from the podium drew lusty boos.
Now he’s closing in on the Republican presidential nomination amidst the dashed dreams of many conservative activists, and he has to decide whether he wants to assuage the crowd with some tasty panders, or accept their wrath and cash it in for some general election credibility. Actually, he may do neither, and instead take the advice of Kate O’Beirne and Ramesh Ponnuru, who suggest that he spend his time at CPAC lashing the Democratic foe, in hopes that most conservatives won’t follow Ann Coulter, Michelle Malkin, and James Dobson in threatening to take a dive in November.
McCain’s trial is complicated somewhat by the fact that Mitt Romney will speak at CPAC several hours earlier. And the Mittster, of course, has his own tough decisions to make. Does he challenge McCain with a fiery speech demanding that conservatives stick to their prejudices and reject the Arizonan? Or does he start making those conciliatory noises necessary to slowly fold his tent, save some money, and keep his options open for a future presidential run? After his CPAC address, Romney has the unpleasant task of trudging up Capitol Hill to meet with the hordes of GOP members of Congress who endorsed his candidacy. He’ll have to come up with something better to say than: “Stick with me til the accountants say it’s time to quit.”