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.

On Saturday, after Sen. Clinton wrapped up her remarks at the Virginia Jefferson-Jackson dinner, her spokesman – Phil Singer — gathered reporters around him and released some fundraising numbers. Since Super Tuesday, he said, more than 100,000 of Hillary Clinton’s supporters had contributed more than $10 million to the campaign.
To this point, her money strategy had been aggressively traditional. Her fundraisers seemed to have successfully twisted the arms of every high dollar donor in the country. By December, she’d raised more early money than any other presidential candidate in history; but at the same time, many of her donors were had hit the contribution limit, or “maxed out.”
Then the real nomination contest actually started.
As people began voting, the campaigns increased their spending. Just before 24 states went to the polls on Super Tuesday, the Obama campaign announced that they had raised a jaw-dropping $32 million in the month of January. The next day, as reporters tried to sort through delegate counts, the Clinton camp quietly acknowledged that the senator had loaned her campaign $5 million the week before. If necessary, they said, she was prepared to put up even more personal cash to keep on going.
The national media quickly judged this as a warning sign. Facing a rough calendar between February 5 and March 4 (when Texas and Ohio seem like states where she will do well), some began asking how much she would be willing to spend and whether she would have the resources keep going if losses began to mount.
In her speech on Super Tuesday, however, Clinton did something new — she mentioned her website and asked voters directly to visit HillaryClinton.com. The combination of those two things — the seeming desperation of the personal loan and the explicit appeal to visit her website – appears to have triggered a small donor chain reaction. In the first 24 hours after Super Tuesday, the campaign reported a haul of a haul of $4 million. Since then, the Clinton camp happily tells us that this well of support does not appear to have bottom.
Some who watch the money race were astounded by this development, but frankly, there is nothing surprising in these numbers. The simple fact that a lot of smart people forget is this — Hillary Clinton’s supporters are just as passionate about their candidate as those of Barack Obama.
That essential truth has been reflected in every national and state poll in this race — even as Obama’s support climbs, hers does not waver. That’s been obvious on the electoral front, from NH to CA. But it’s also been manifested on the money front, where women and men all across the country have continued to see her candidacy as an inspiring, historic moment in American history.
In this click-to-give internet era, that is fundraising magic, as her rival has shown so well. All the new Clinton donors needed, it appears, was a reason to give. Somehow, with her traditional donor success and frontrunner status, Hillary Clinton was forgetting to ask these people to support her. But that moment of vulnerability seems to have changed all that — these small donors are buying into her campaign and making it their own. Unlike her old contributors, they are much less likely to abandon her if the campaign stumbles in Texas or Pennsylvania.
Barack Obama hasn’t released any numbers since Wednesday, when his staff said that the campaign had raised another $7.9 million. On a call with reporters over the weekend, they maintained that their fundraising totals were still ahead of hers. But just a week ago, it looked like Obama would have a decisive money advantage going forward. Now it’s likely that both campaigns will have the resources to keep going for as long as this race lasts. And if both money machines can somehow be merged, the eventual Democratic general election campaign is going to be exceptionally well-heeled.

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.

(NOTE: The following is a guest post by Alan Abramowitz, who is Alben W. Barkley Professor of Political Science at Emory University, and a member of The Democratic Strategist’s Advisory Board).
Now that Arizona Senator John McCain has all but sewn up the Republican presidential nomination, the first task that faces him is winning over disgruntled conservatives, many of whom were supporting former Massachusetts Governor Mitt Romney in the Republican primaries. To that end, McCain gave a conciliatory speech on February 8th at the Conservative Political Action Conference in Washington, DC, pleading with conservative leaders and activists to unite behind his candidacy.
Meanwhile the two remaining Democratic candidates, Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama, are locked in a tight battle that could go on for several more weeks and possibly continue all the way to the Democratic convention. This has led to growing concern among Democratic leaders that a protracted battle between Clinton and Obama could make it difficult to unite the party for the general election campaign.
It is clear that unifying their respective parties will be a key task for both John McCain and the eventual Democratic nominee. But for which party’s nominee will this task be more difficult? The answer to this question will depend in part on how deep the ideological divisions are between supporters of the nominee and supporters of the defeated candidates in each party.
In order to compare the difficulty of the task that John McCain faces with the difficulty of the task that will face either Hillary Clinton or Barack Obama, I compared the ideological preferences of each candidate’s supporters based on data collected in the Democratic and Republican exit polls for California on Super Tuesday. I used exit poll data from California because California was by far the biggest prize in both parties, none of the candidates is from the state, and the primary was hotly contested in both parties.
I calculated the mean score of each candidate’s supporters on a five-point liberal-conservative scale that was included on the exit poll. The scores on this scale were 1 for very liberal, 2 for somewhat liberal, 3 for moderate, 4 for somewhat conservative, and 5 for very conservative. Thus a mean score of 3.0 would indicate that the average supporter of a candidate was right in the middle of the liberal-conservative scale while a mean score of 2.0 would indicate that the average supporter of a candidate was well to the left of center and a mean score of 4.0 would indicate that the average supporter of a candidate was well to the right of center.
The results of my calculations showed that the mean scores for Clinton and Obama supporters were almost identical: 2.5 for Clinton voters vs. 2.4 for Obama voters. In contrast, the mean scores for McCain and Romney supporters were quite distinct: 3.5 for McCain voters vs. 4.1 for Romney voters. The ideological divide between McCain and Romney voters was six times as large as the ideological divide between Clinton and Obama voters. And on this sort of scale with a very limited range, that is a very large difference.
The average Obama and Clinton voter was a moderate liberal. Similarly, the average McCain voter was a moderate conservative. McCain voters were about as far to the right of center as Clinton and Obama voters were to the left of center. But Romney voters were much further to the right of center. Given that Americans generally don’t like to place themselves at the extremes on these sorts of scales, it is striking that 40 percent of Romney voters in California placed themselves at the far right end of the scale. In contrast, only 12 percent of McCain voters placed themselves at the far right end of the scale and only 18 percent of Clinton voters and 22 percent of Obama voters placed themselves at the far left end of the scale.
These results suggest that despite clinching his party’s nomination much earlier than his Democratic opponent, John McCain may face a more difficult challenge in uniting his party’s voters than either Hillary Clinton or Barack Obama. Because supporters of Clinton and Obama have almost identical ideological preferences, it should not be difficult for either group to unite behind the other candidate if he or she wins the nomination. The winning candidate will not need to move to the left or right in order to win over supporters of the defeated candidate.
John McCain, however, may be forced to move further to the right in the next few weeks in order to win over disappointed supporters of Mitt Romney. In fact, this is precisely the course of action that is being urged on him by conservative spokesmen and it appears to be what he was attempting to do in his speech to the Conservative Political Action Conference, a group that he shunned only a year ago. But this may be a risky strategy for McCain since it will delay if not prevent him from moving back to the center to appeal to independents and swing voters in the general election-a move that will be crucial if he is to have any chance of winning in November.

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.

In addition to J.P. Green’s list, here are some good reads for this Friday:
At TNR, Josh Patashnik offers a good profile of Virginia’s Democratic presidential primary next Tuesday, which appears likely to be the major Potomac battleground between Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama. The piece is a bit argumentative, in that it challenges the DC media assumption that the Old Dominion will be a slam dunk for Obama, but it provides a solid summary of the state’s political demographics.
On the Republican side, you might want to check out John McCain’s remarks to the Conservative Political Action Committee yesterday, which promised a general election full of ideological contrasts. It’s hard to say if the speech achieved its designed effect; at National Review, most of the CPAC coverage was devoted to Mitt Romney’s withdrawal, and speculation about his future. Indeed, Yuval Levin contributes another one of those lists of conservative demands that McCain shoud be forced to accept, Michelle Malkin urges conservatives to ignore the presidential race altogether and look down-ballot, and Mona Charon professes her heart to be broken by McCain’s victory.
Meanwhile, over at the Wall Street Journal, Pat Toomey of the Club For Growth offers a short list of names from which McCain could pick a running-mate to assuage the economic conservative/K Street crowd. The list includes two failed Republican presidential candidates from the past, Phil Gramm and Steve Forbes.

Scout Finch reports at Daily Kos that Clinton raised an impressive $5 million in 48 hours, Obama raised $7.2 million in the same period, a little more than McCain raised — during all of January.
The title of Monica Davey’s New York Times article on the Great Bellweather State’s phat Tuesday vote,”Razor-Thin Margins in Missouri Reflect Nationwide Split,” somewhat contradicts it’s most interesting statistic: Dems 823,754; Reps 589,173.
Also at The Grey Lady, David Brook’s op-ed has some interesting stats amid the faux interview snarkage: “The next states on the primary calendar have tons of college-educated Obamaphile voters. Maryland is 5th among the 50 states, Virginia is 6th. But later on, we get the Hillary-friendly states. Ohio is 40th in college education. Pennsylvania is 32nd.”
Chris Kromm notes a disturbing pair of Tsunami Tuesday exit poll figures in his Facing South post, that 9.5 percent of Democratic voters admit that race was a factor in voting against Obama, while 8 percent of Dem voters said gender was a factor in voting against Clinton. Imagine what the numbers would be on the GOP side.
Elections bird-dog Steven Rosenfeld reports at Alternet.org that 13 percent of New Mexico voters found they were not on precinct voter rolls when they showed up at the polls on 2/5. Some 17 thousand provisional ballots may determine the ultimate outcome.
In his “Digesting the Numbers” post at NDNblog, Andres Ramirez has a statistic that should get Democratic strategists thinking: The number of Latino primary voters increased by nearly a million from ’04 to ’08 in four states alone: NY; CA; AZ; and FL.
In CA also, the Latino turnout exceeded expectations, according to Josh Patashnik’s post at TNR’s The Plank — 29 percent of the CA vote, in stark contrast to the Field Poll’s prediction of 20 percent. Patashnick reports that Field also predicted an Obama win and a 12 percent (of the total vote) Af-Am turnout, compared to the 6 percent who actually voted.

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.