James Vega is a strategic marketing consultant whose clients include major nonprofit organizations and high-tech firms
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I. Understanding the “pro-military, but anti-Bush’s war” voters
Because of the number and variety of questions they ask on a single topic, the surveys produced by Democracy Corps provide Democrats with data of unique value. They make it possible to begin to visualize some of the larger political perspectives into which voters specific opinions are organized.
The recent D-Corps survey and analysis of opinion on National Security, for example, makes it possible to get a feel for the size of two broad groups — the firmly partisan anti-war Democratic “base” voters and the firmly partisan pro-Bush’s war, pro-military” Republican “base” voters.
On the one hand, about 27% of the respondents in the D-Corps survey agreed with every one of the following five statements
Firmly Partisan Anti-War Democrats
• The Democrats will do a better job “insuring a strong military”
• The Democrats, more than Republicans “respect the military”
• The surge was “a mistake”
• In Iraq, America should “reduce the number of troops”
• Bush’s policies have “undermined America’s security”
On the other hand, about 45% of the respondents agreed with all five of the following statements
Firmly Partisan Pro-Bush’s War, Pro-Military Republicans
• The Republicans will do a better job of “insuring a strong military”
• The Republicans, more than the Democrats, “Respect the military”
• The surge is helping to “win the war”
• America must “Stay the course”, “finish the job” and “achieve stability”
• Bush’s policies have “increased America’s security”
The most important fact that emerges from this comparison is the very substantial number of respondents – about 30% — who do not fall in either category. They agreed with some of the five statements but not others.
But what do these “inconsistent” voters actually think? Among the respondents to the D-Corps survey as a whole, the main distinction was between responses to the first two questions and the final three.
On the one hand, only about 27% of all respondents to the D-Corps survey thought the Democrats would be better at “insuring a strong military” or “respecting the military”. About 55% thought the Republicans would be better.
In contrast, about 54% of all respondents agreed that “the surge was a mistake”, that “we should reduce the number of troops” and that “Bush’s policies have reduced America’s security”. Only about 44% thought we should “stay the course”, that “the surge was working” and that Bush’s policies have “increased America’s security”
In short, while a majority of Americans think Republicans are more favorable to the military, many are also strongly opposed to Bush’s policies. It is this significant “pro-military, but anti-Bush’s war” group that is the critical swing vote on national security.

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Andrew Kohut, president of the Pew Research Center, has a New York Times op-ed that merits a careful read by all Democratic candidates, especially Senator Obama. Kohut warns that “The personal and social resistance of older voters to the party’s likely nominee could well keep a Democrat out of the White House and reverse the nationwide Democratic trend,” and he provides polling evidence to make his case. Kohut cites an 8 point advantage (51-43) for McCain over Obama in favorability ratings by seniors in recent Pew Research Center polling, and notes,

…older voters — many of whom supported Democrats over the years — seem reluctant to support Mr. Obama. Hillary Clinton has carried the vote of people over 65 in 26 primary elections. And looking forward to the general election, the national polls now show John McCain running better against Mr. Obama among this older age group — as well as among middle-aged voters and younger voters.

The senior vote is becoming more important every election, because it is growing and because of seniors’ high turnout rates. The Kiplinger Retirement Report notes, for example, that “In the 2000 elections, people age 65 and older cast 25% of the votes although they made up only 12% of the U.S. population.”
In his Newsweek article “Generation Gap: Obama is trailing with older voters. Can he win them over?,” Jonathan Alter writes that “40 percent of the voters in Pennsylvania were over 60, which is not surprising considering that Pennsylvania trails only Florida as the oldest state in the union.”
Senator Obama is well-aware of his shortage of senior voters. Alter quotes Obama: “If you look at the numbers, our problem has less to do with white working-class voters [than] with older voters.” Alter agrees:

Obama did better among seniors in Pennsylvania, where he lost 59-41 percent, than in Ohio, where Hillary crushed him by 41 points in that age cohort. That 69-28 drubbing tells us almost everything we need to know about why Hillary won Ohio by 10 points on March 4.

Kohut points out that “significantly more older voters hold the highly conservative social opinions” on social issues like equal rights, iinterracial dating and immigration. He also provides April polling data showing McCain has an edge over Obama in the perceptions of RV’s 65 and older regarding characteristics such as: ‘patriotic’ (91-57); ‘tough’ (71-46); ‘honest (76-57); and ‘down to earth’ (68-51). However, Obama is more ‘inspiring’ to seniors by a margin of 53 to 39 percent.
Obama probably can’t make much headway with seniors who like McCain mostly because of his age/character/bio or conservative values. But Obama can make inroads into McCain-leaning senior voters who care about policy. Obama, like Clinton, has more agreeable policies for seniors regarding critical issues like Social Security, health care and Iraq. McCain will hit hard on tax cuts in appealing to seniors. But if Obama’s messaging on the aforementioned issues is sharp and well-targeted, he should be able to win a healthy portion of the senior vote. As Alter observes of McCain:

His problem is Social Security. McCain recently told The Wall Street Journal that he continues to support President Bush’s idea for private accounts. Whatever one thinks of that proposal on the merits, it’s a pitiful loser politically. Every place Bush visited in 2005 when he was stumping for his plan saw a decline in his popularity numbers when he left town…When Social Security gets discussed this fall, McCain had better duck. If anything, with the market down, privatization is even less popular now than in 2005. All the Democratic candidate has to say is, “If Senator McCain’s idea had been adopted, you would have lost a chunk of your retirement in the stock market.”

Alter is more optimistic about Dems’ chances with older voters, and believes “…Grandma and grandpa are likely to return home in November and vote Democratic, regardless of the nominee.” And given their unrivaled turnout rates, seniors — especially those who can be described as ‘high information’ voters — just may provide Obama’s margin of victory.

One way or another, this Democratic primary will be done very soon, and barring an unthinkable tragedy or scandal, Hillary Clinton will be making a decision about how to end her campaign for president.
She’ll give a speech where she’ll reflect on the victories she won and the barriers she broke. She’ll thank her campaign staff, her activists, and her donors. She’ll try to pay her debts, conduct an audit for the FEC, and then return to the Senate to think about what might have been and what might one day still be.
And that’s it, right?
Not exactly.
No matter what the office, every campaign is about building a network of support. The end result might be a collections of names written on index cards and bound with a rubber band or it might be data for a million supporters in a voter vault.
But for the presidential campaigns, it also includes the sometimes small but actively engaged networks they’ve built on sites across the Web.
Hillary Clinton has 198,664 friends on MySpace, 155,486 supporters on Facebook, 13,851 subscribers on YouTube, and 3,793 followers on Twitter.
Each of them represents a person who made a conscious decision to connect with Clinton and her campaign. They deserve the dignity of an appropriate goodbye and thank you.
Unless, that is, Clinton has an idea about what she wants to do next.
She began her bid for the presidency with a YouTube video where she called for a national conversation about the challenges facing the country. That doesn’t have to end just because her campaign does. Particularly online.
The Web offers Clinton (and every other politician) the opportunity to connect with people directly, without the filters of the mainstream news or the impersonality of a campaign rally. That’s a valuable resource no matter what Clinton’s future holds. She would be smart to continue developing it.
But if she does choose to close up shop, she should take a careful look at what John Edwards did and learn a lesson.
As he ran for president, Edwards carefully built a presence on more than twenty social networking and media sites. He updated them regularly right up until the day he suspended his campaign. And then all of a sudden, there was nothing. His last update on Twitter still reads:

On my way to Finley hospital in Dubuque, Iowa to talk with nurses and local SEIU members. Then I’m off to a community meeting in Montice

That’s a big mistake and one that’s undone some of the good will he’d managed to build online.
A loss is always hard, but a politician who wants to campaign online can’t just walk away when the race is done.

For any of you who may be hard-core HRC fans dismayed by all the “it’s over” talk in the news media and the blogosphere, RealClearPolitics’ Jay Cost offers a ray of hope: a self-consciously “contrarian” analysis of how blowout wins in WV, KY and PR could still give Clinton a plausible argument that she’s won the cumulative popular vote.
The only problem with Cost’s scenario is that it requires superdelegates to stay on the fence until after Puerto Rico votes. It’s true that the stampede of superdelegates to Obama that many observers predicted after his NC win hasn’t occurred just yet, and some have made it clear they’ll hold off announcing their intentions until the voting’s over. But still, a Clinton victory remains the political equivalent of a full-court shot at the buzzer.

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.

With all the talk about the consequences of Barack Obama’s big victory in NC, there’s been less analysis than usual about how, exactly, he did it.
Tuesday morning, there were a lot of people who believed that the race between Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama in North Carolina would be close. There were rumors that Obama’s support among white voters had plummeted, speculation that turnout among African-Americans might be down, and just days before Clinton predicted that North Carolina would be a “game changer.”
Then, the polls closed and the networks immediately projected Obama as the winner. On MSNBC, the language used to describe the victory was “decisive.”
So what happened?
Demographics.
Race
A Democrat needs a biracial coalition to win just about any race in North Carolina — particularly a primary. Clinton’s support among blacks was just 7 percent. As Matt Yglesias cheerfully pointed out, George Allen got 15 percent of African-American voters in neighboring Virginia in 2006. In the exit polls, black Democrats made up a third of the electorate on Tuesday. To offset that advantage Clinton needed to get better than 70 percent of the white vote, and it didn’t happen.
Geography
For a big part of the state’s history, by agreement, the governor’s mansion rotated back and forth between politicians from the east and politicians from the west. Each governor was limited to a single term and the state party was often controlled by a machine, so the transition was easy. But modern political history has been dominated by the eastern part of the state, which has provided a political base for governors like Jim Hunt and Mike Easley, senators like Jesse Helms and John Edwards, and even legislators like Senate President Pro Tempore Marc Basnight. Obama won the east easily, and that region made up a quarter of the state’s vote.
Cities
Everyone know that Obama was going to do well in North Carolina’s urban areas. To offset that advantage, the Clinton campaign dispatched the former president on a tour of the state’s rural areas, hoping to drive up the vote there.
It didn’t work.
The vote was so high in some cities that voters were still standing in line and waiting to vote even after CNN had called the race for Obama. Obama won the Charlotte area by 11 points, the Greensboro area by 16 points, and Raleigh/Durham by 30 points.
By the way, Obama also won the rural part of the state by a 52-45 margin.
Education
There’s been a lot said about Obama’s need to win “beer track” voters, but in North Carolina, those with at least some college education made up 70 percent of the electorate last night. Those with college and post-graduate degrees made up almost half of all voters. Obama won every single education group by double digits, but his margins among the college educated allowed him to run up the score.

Take a break from the rat-a-tat-tat of the horse race, and give a gander to Rob Capriccioso’s “Game Changer: Nationwide No-Excuse Absentee Voting” over at Campaigns & Elections Politics website. Absentee balloting has become an increasingly important factor in campaigns in recent years, with huge percentages of voters casting early ballots in states like California. But the patchwork of state laws regarding absentee voting falls well short of serving all voters who find it difficult to get to the polls on election day. As Capriccioso explains:

Currently, 21 states plus the District of Columbia restrict voters’ ability to vote absentee. In such states, the elderly, individuals with disabilities or an illness, and those who serve in the military are eligible to vote by mail. Excuses, like having to work, a lack of childcare, or jury service don’t cut it. Twenty-eight states now offer voters the option of voting by mail for any reason, and Oregon conducts its elections entirely by mail.

To help address the problem Rep. Susan Davis (D-CA) has introduced the Universal Right to Vote by Mail Act, which would permit every voter in every state the right to vote absentee for any reason whatsoever.
Some believe the bill would benefit the GOP. But as TDS co-editor Bill Galston points out in Capriccioso’s article:

“The traditional argument is that the more open the system is to people who are less strongly attached to it, the more likely you are to increase the share of young adults, first-time voters and moderates,” Galston said. “To the extent that that’s true, those factors would work to the advantage of Democrats.”

The legislation would likely lead to changes in the way campaigns are organized, as Capriccioso explains:

Instead of planning for one Election Day in November, campaigns would have to be prepared to compete in a series of mini-rolling elections in every single state. And the audiences they would be playing to would likely be more diverse, since younger voters, moderates and elderly voters often disproportionately take advantage of absentee voting, if it’s available.

The bill has been approved by the House Administration Committee. Similar legislation is expected in the Senate.

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.

I think Ed’s post below is essentially right — the results in North Carolina and Indiana changed nothing in terms of actuality.
But yesterday, I watched MSNBC until just after midnight when Tim Russert said, “We now know who the Democratic nominee is gonna be, and no one’s going to dispute it.”
It’s amazing how much that one remark seems to have changed the perceptions of the race.
Perhaps the truth is that the press corps had already quietly come to the conclusion that the math mattered and Obama was going to be the Democratic nominee. Maybe they were just waiting for a word from Russert to validate that thought.
But for whatever the reason, the narrative has shifted. It now favors Obama, just as the math does.
The next 48 hours will be the test. If Russert’s pronouncement is influential enough to force a bevy of superdelegates to show their cards or switch support from Clinton to Obama, then his words will be a self-fulfilling prophecy. The race will be over.
But then, how does the Obama campaign deal with the twin problems of West Virginia and Kentucky?
Just as demographics favored Obama in North Carolina, the voter makeup in these two states is clearly stacked in Clinton’s favor. Polling paints a pretty bleak picture for the Illinois senator. It’s just a fact that Clinton will likely win Kentucky and West Virginia whether she’s in the race or not.
How awful would it look for the presumptive Democratic nominee to lose these contests to a candidate who isn’t running anymore?
Last night was a good one for Barack Obama, but this race isn’t going to be over until at least May 20th. And honestly, that might be the best possible result.
Update: Maybe the superdelegates are listening. Four have announced their intention to support Obama today, compared to just one for Clinton.

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.