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.

I’ve been watching MSNBC’s early coverage of the PA primary, and it’s been a roller-coaster of hints that the race is very close and hints that Clinton may wind up winning pretty big. The gradual drip of exit poll date has, even more than usually, contributed to this confusing impression.
The one clearly interesting thing I’ve heard on this network so far is actually by Howard Fineman, who’s saying that Obama’s real PA strategy was to bleed HRC’s finances while limiting her margin of victory. Under that theory, if Obama avoids a double-digit loss while forcing the Clinton campaign into virtual penury, then he’s lost the battle, but maybe contributed to victory in the war. We’ll see.

The record turnout in the PA Democratic primary is not without problems. Every time a state votes, we hear stories about voter intimidation, misprinted ballots, and equipment failures. Most of these issues turn out to be inconsequential.
But if you like hearing about them anyway, check out Elections Journal. A team of activists (led by a Republican named Mike Roman) is on the ground in the Keystone State using web tools like Twitter, Flickr, YouTube, and Google Maps to document alleged abuses.
And lest we forget, there is a reason that Democrats organize voter protection teams on Election Day.

For you serious political junkies, The New Republic‘s Noam Scheiber has published a fascinating profile of David Plouffe, Barack Obama’s publicity-averse campaign manager. You’d be excused for forgetting that Plouffe’s the top guy, given the high visibility of “strategist” David Axelrod (Plouffe’s colleague in pre-Obama political consulting); this inside-outside division of labor is a deliberate arrangement they worked out in advance.
Scheiber’s take on Plouffe’s key role focuses on the Obama campaign’s success in organizing caucus states from Iowa on, and also on its efforts to make “pledged delegates” the key media optic for measuring success in the Democratic contest. There’s not anything about Plouffe’s general election strategy if Obama wins the nomination, but you have to give Scheiber a lot of credit for getting any sort of coherent profile done of an operative who refuses to be interviewed.

The long hiaitus in Democratic primary voting is finally over, as voters troop to the polls in PA today. MSNBC’s First Read has a reasonably good assessment of the range of likely results, which will only have a big impact on the nomination contest if Barack Obama pulls off an upset win (which would be as big a blow to the polling industry as HRC’s win in NH), or if HRC wins by a bigger margin than in Ohio (i.e., by double digits). A very narrow Clinton win would produce the most intense spin wars, since most polls predict a high-single-digit margin for her. Even with a comfortable but not overwhelming victory in PA, she’s unlikely to make any significant net gains in pledged delegates, though she could shave Obama’s (roughly) 700,000 lead in the cumulative popular vote by somewhere between 150,000 to 200,000.
If you’re planning to watch the network/cable coverage of the primary results tonight, expect a lot of talk (particularly if there is a significant gap in time between the release of exit poll data and the “calling” of the state) about Obama’s relative performance among various categories of white voters–those without college educations, Catholics, Appalachians, etc., etc.–perhaps with comparisons to his numbers in Ohio. Another good bet is a lot of confused discussion about the cumulative popular vote totals, which will vary from count to count based on all sorts of definitional factors. And yet another lead-pipe cinch will be close scrutiny of exit poll data about the alleged willingness of Clinton and Obama voters in PA to desert the party in November if their candidate does not get the nomination. (Note, however, the TDS staff post earlier today pointing to historical evidence that such defections rarely happen in big numbers, whatever voters say months away from the general election.)
While it may not get much media attention unless the numbers are really surprising, total turnout–generally expected to be in the neighborhood of a record 2 million–will be interesting, not just in terms of the possible impact on the Clinton-Obama competition, but as a reflection of (a) the year-long national trend towards a significant expansion of Democratic registration, and/or (b) the existence or absence of “voter fatigue,” which some observers expect as a product of the increasingly negative nature of the contest, or of television ad over-saturation. The weather, described this morning by the Philadelphia Inquirer as “a near perfect spring day…across the Keystone State,” certainly won’t depress turnout.
Stay tuned here for updates tonight as developments warrant. We’ll try to add some value to the media chatter.

One of the fears about the fallout from a hard-fought presidential primary season is the possibility of a “sore loser” effect, in which a substantial number of voters who supported the losing candidate vote for the nominee of the other party. This is a growing concern for Dems in ’08, particularly in light of McCain’s much-trumpeted crossover appeal.
Alan I. Abramowitz addresses the issue in his post “Will Disappointed Dems Vote for McCain? Crossover voting and defection in past elections” at Larry J. Sabato’s Crystal Ball. Abramowitz, author of Voice of the People: Elections and Voting Behavior in the United States, crunches the numbers from past elections and polls, and his tightly-argued analysis provides encouragement for Dems. As Abramowitz concludes,

This November, barring a major disaster at the Democratic convention, it is highly unlikely that many Democratic voters will cross party lines to vote for John McCain. It is equally unlikely that many Republican voters will cross party lines to vote for Barack Obama or Hillary Clinton. In contrast to the fluidity and unpredictability that has characterized the nomination contests in both parties, the voting patterns in November will be highly predictable and consistent with those seen in other recent general elections — close to 90 percent of all votes will be cast by party identifiers for their own party’s presidential candidate. Whichever party turns out more of its own supporters on Election Day is likely to emerge as the winner.

Clearly the downside for Dems here is that hopes for our nominee getting substantial Republican votes are also not well-supported by historical data. Better to put all of that hopeful energy into mobilizing and turning out Democrats and Independents.

I have a very high regard for Ross Douthat of The Atlantic, exceeded only by Ramesh Ponnuru as a conservative commentator who consistently manages to rise above talking-points-distribution and cant, and make us all think twice about our comfortable partisan assumptions. But his contribution today to the backlash against the backlash to the ABC-sponsored Democratic debate last week is disappointing.
At considerable length, Douthat defends what he calls “the freakshow” of non-substantive candidate grilling on this basic ground:

[W]hen we elect a new chief executive, we aren’t just electing to live with their policy positions. We’re deciding to live with their personalities – their sexual appetites and Daddy issues, their spouses and their friends, their religious beliefs and their psychodramas – for four or eight long years.

Well, of course. But do we really need obsessive dwelling on such “issues” in network-broadcast candidate debates to give the country a peek at the personalities of potential presidents? Reading Ross, you’d think we were still living in the long-lost days when clubby journalists conspired to stifle reporting or discussion about, say, John F. Kennedy’s sex life or Richard Nixon’s use of profanity. They are truly long lost, for better or for worse.
So the question right now is not whether the public has a right to know about Obama’s choice of ministers or what a sociologist might deduce from what Obama or HRC says privately to donors, but whether that’s all the public needs to know. There is zero question that Americans know a lot more about certain of Jeremiah Wright’s opinions than those of Barack Obama on a host of subjects. It’s also clear that voters have massive sources of “information,” positive and negative, real and contrived and manufactured, about the personalities and “stories” of Hillary Clinton and John McCain. How much is enough? How much is too much? And if “debates” need to focus on such matters, why do we bother having supposedly sober journalists moderate? Why not just let Drudge and Dowd moderate, and show the whole thing on Entertainment Tonight?
Generally speaking, ABC’s defenders are depicting its critics as naive and wonky elitists who don’t understand real politics, or conversely, as cynics who are only upset that the debate didn’t go well for Barack Obama. I can’t speak for all the critics, but I have to say my own outrage at the debate was on the order of “Enough’s enough.” Contra Ross Douthat, my own fear is that we are in danger of electing a chief executive with far too little emphasis on their “policy positions” as opposed to their “personalities”–just as, arguably, we did in 2000 and 2004. And my only partisanship in rejecting the final descent into largely substance-free debates isn’t about Obama versus Clinton, but instead reflects an informed opinion that Republicans desperately want to make the general election a contest of “personalities” rather than “policy positions.”
Given his general body of work, I wouldn’t accuse Ross Douthat of that motive. But the idea that Americans need more and more of a style of campaign coverage that even he describes as a “freakshow” clearly ought to raise more suspicions of candidate or party special pleading than the views of the “freakshow’s” critics.

There was a revealing comment at National Review‘s The Corner yesterday by Mark Steyn, who sneers at a Michael Cowley quotation of a Bush political operative who said: “You guys never get it….People don’t vote on issues. They vote on character.”
Sez Steyn:

Well, why shouldn’t they vote on “character”? Barack Obama has no accomplishments, no legislative record, no nuthin’. So if you don’t want to vote on character (ie, his condescension to crackers too boorish to understand how sophisticatedly nuanced it is to have a terrorist pal and a racist pastor), what else is left?

Uh, gee, Mark, how’s about those “issues?” Does Barack Obama have to have “accomplishments” with respect to the war in Iraq to offer a slightly different form of leadership on Iraq than John McCain? And for that matter, do you really want to bet the presidency on John McCain’s “accomplishments” and “legislative record” when it comes to the economy?
Get used to this, folks. Republicans are going to do everything imaginable to make the general election “about” something, anything, other than the simple fact that they are out of touch with a majority of Americans on a wide variety of “issues.” This will definitely include elitist, snobby instructions to Americans that their interest in “issues” is a form of false consciousness that obscures their actual obligation to vote on the basis of “character,” as defined by people like Mark Steyn.

It’s hard to believe that only a few months ago John McCain was using some questionable legal prestidigitation to get a bank loan just to stay in the presidential race.
Now, this gem from the Hotline’s perusal of the presumptive GOP nominee’s FEC report shows that things are certainly looking up on the money front:

$2,546.56
That’s how much cashola John McCain’s campaign spent March 2 at Barney’s New York in Beverly Hills. (That’s Zip Code 90212, in case anyone was wondering.)
According to McCain’s latest FEC report, the charges were “credited back” April 2.

This little tidbit stands out for two reasons.
First, John McCain just spent the past two weeks calling Barack Obama an elitist because the Illinois senator said that some voters are bitter. Now he is dropping individual maximum contributions at Blair Waldorf‘s favorite store. And in Beverly Hills, no less! Maybe McCain is the perfect candidate for Heidi Montag, after all.
Second, exactly how many jokes did we hear about John Edwards’ haircut and how is this any different at all? If Edwards was wrong to spend campaign cash on a grooming session, surely Barney’s is equally undeserving of donor dollars. What exactly does McCain need to do for his pals in the press to ask some hard questions about his judgment? Get into a shoving match with a fellow Republican senator? Oh, wait.
From a progressive standpoint, I guess it is remarkable how much trouble John McCain has managed to get himself into without an opponent. But I’m looking forward to the day when I can see what the Democrats will do to this guy when they aren’t so busy fighting each other.

With Pennsylvania’s Democratic presidential primary on tap for tomorrow, all attention has been focused on the relative strengths and weaknesses of Hillary Clinton–the consensus front-runner in the state, who needs as large a win as possible–and Barack Obama, who once appeared poised for an upset win that could have more or less ended the nomination contest.
But there’s been a secondary “story” in the Keystone State which may or may not have an impact on the Democratic outcome, but will definitely matter in November: a big surge in new Democratic voter registrations accompanied by another big surge in re-registrations into the Democratic column.
Jeanne Cummings has a good write-up of the phenomenon for The Politico. Here are her main findings:

According to the Secretary of State’s office, since January about 217,000 new voters have registered for the April 22 primary, the vast majority of whom signed up as Democrats….
That statewide Democratic surge has been accompanied by a flood of party-switching. More than 178,000 voters have changed their party status since January — and the Democrats have captured 92 percent of those voters.

Cummings quotes some speculation that this accretion of new Democratic voters–which is especially heavy in the Philadelphia area and in college towns–could help Obama outperform poll ratings tomorrow. But she really focuses on the possibility that we are witnessing “an ongoing partisan shift in Pennsylvania that could soon move it out of the battleground presidential states and ripple across congressional races this fall, as well.” That’s particularly true if you view the current spike in party-switching as a continuation of the realignment begun by Ed Rendell’s 2002 gubernatorial campaign, which arguably contributed to the big Democratic wins in the state in 2006.