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abated; in WA, where he seems to have “won,” 74% of caucus-goers voted for somebody else, including candidates who have withdrawn from the race.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.

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.”

(Note: this is crossed-posted from TPMCafe.com).
Now that an extended Democratic nomination contest appears almost certain, there’s been an explosion of renewed interest in the “brokered convention” scenario, which really just means a nomination that’s in doubt after the primaries and caucuses are over. The big topics (explored especially well at OpenLeft.com) have been the battle over the 796 superdelegates, who are not bound by election results, and the possibility of a pre-convention or convention credentials fight over the Michigan and Florida delegations, who currently have no seats (or even hotel rooms) in Denver.
There’s a more mundane but still significant problem with the situation: who will plan and execute the convention itself in the absence of a putative nominee?
National political conventions, despite the increasingly meagre live network television exposure they secure, are large, complex operations. Much of the initial preparation–fundraising, logistics, and site development–are done many months in advance, by local committees working with national party committees. But when it comes to the really crucial functions of a convention, such as who will speak when, what they will say, and how the whole show is presented to television viewers and to a massive international news media presence: every decision, major or minor, has in recent years been made with totalitarian authority by the putative nominee’s staff.
As it happens, I’ve been a small cog in the machine during the last five Democratic Conventions, working in the script and speechwriting shops. To a large extent, convention operations are run by a floating circus of people, most of whom have been doing this as long as or longer than I have, who have regular day jobs and report for convention duty every four years. While the nominee’s staff don’t necessarily involve themselves in every minute detail, they have total veto power over everything that happens at a convention, and usually do micromanage the schedule, the speakers’ list, and most of all the message. In 2004, for example, the Kerry-Edwards campaign set up a two-tiered vetting system for every speech (the second tier, where I worked, controlled what went on the teleprompter), and imposed strict message discipline on even the least important afternoon two-minute address (Al Sharpton was the one speaker who defied both the schedule and the message rules, with electrifying effect). All media communications were coordinated by the nominee’s staff as well. And while much of this “controlling” activity happened at the convention itself, or in the week before it, the systems obviously had to be set up much earlier.
So: who’s going to make all these decisions, and set up these systems, if the nominee isn’t known until right before the convention, or until the convention itself? In theory, the DNC would step in, but keep in mind that every single DNC member is also a super-delegate and thus an actual or potential candidate partisan. And it’s not as though there’s any sort of generic schedule or message that can be planned that might not compromise one candidate or another, or the party as a whole
It gets worse: the last really serious platform fight at a Democratic Convention was in 1968. Indeed, the platform committee presentation is typically made to an empty convention hall in the middle of the day, and begins with a motion to dispense reading of the document, perhaps fluffed up by a short thematic speech. If the nomination contest is still in any doubt, platform fights might very well serve as maneuvers by one or both of the candidates to pry lose delegates, none of whom, BTW, will be bound by convention rules to stay with their pledged candidate (most of the non-superdelegates will have been chosen carefully by campaigns, and some may be bound by state laws and party rules). Who even remembers how to manage a platform fight? Who will plan the timing and structure? Nobody knows.
Moreover, in an open convention, every single speaker could represent a time bomb. In the recent past, speakers methodically echoed the convention message set by the putative nominee, and concluded every speech with a ritualistic invocation of the names on the ticket. What if many or most of the speeches tout one candidate over another? Will there be fights over the candidate preference of every politician seeking to get on the schedule? Will delegates and guests get into cheering contests after every speech? Nobody knows that, either.
Maybe, perhaps even probably, none of this chaos will ensue; with only two viable candidates for president, the odds of an open or “brokered” convention remain quite low, and really depend on so close a race that superdelegates or disputed delegations hold the balance of power. And perhaps the excitement associated with a truly deliberative convention outweighs all the concerns I’ve mentioned.
But it is time for Democrats to start thinking about these decisions, lest the convention devolve from excitement to a big, confusing, and divisive waste of precious time.

With Super Tuesday having slipped into Sleep-Deprived Wednesday, everyone is pointing to March 4th as the next big Democratic president contest. Vermont, Rhode Island, Texas, and Ohio are all up for grabs for a total of 370 pledged delegates.
The conventional wisdom says that Ohio and Texas are Hillary’s to lose. In Ohio, she’s got a lot of establishment support, including the endorsement from Gov. Ted Strickland. In Texas, the large number of Latino voters seems to give her a demographic edge.
However, as Ben Smith of the Politico mentioned after an Obama campaign conference call this morning, Texas isn’t a conventional primary:

It’s a mixed primary and caucus system, with two-thirds of the delegates awarded through primaries and a third through caucuses open only to primary voters.

In a moment of masochism, I pulled up the rules for the Texas nominating process. The two campaigns will be competing for delegates in 31 senatorial districts. There’s a formula for determining how those delegates are appropriated that gives equal weight to the district’s performance in the last governor’s race and presidential election:

Let P equal a given district’s percentage of the statewide Democratic vote in the last gubernatorial election, and let V equal that district’s percentage of the total statewide vote for the Democratic nominee in the last presidential election (district vote/state vote). ( P + V) divided by 2 = that district’s percentage of the total number of Delegates to be elected by the senatorial districts, as opposed to the number to be elected at-large..

That makes up 2/3rds of the pledged delegates. The rest are at-large, assigned through a caucus vote with its own set of procedures.
Obviously, Texas Democrats have a particularly complicated procedure for distributing their delegates, which lends itself to intensive organization. That’s always been on Obama strength, and last night, he absolutely dominated caucus elections — winning Alaska, Colorado, Kansas, Minnesota and North Dakota. His margins overall were better than 2-1.
That sets up an interesting test in TX between Obama’s organizational strength and one of HRC’s most important demographic advantages. That’s yet another thing to watch as this amazingly close competiiton moves on to the next stage.

So the big day has finally come and gone, and the short interpretation of the results is that Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama remain locked in a tight competition that will continue for at least a month or two, while John McCain’s nomination appears increasingly certain, though accompanied by a notable lack of enthusiasm.
There’s enormous confusion today about the delegate count on the Democratic side, primarily because actual delegate awards in many states await final certified returns. One objective estimate has Obama slightly ahead in terms of pledged delegates won yesterday; another gives Clinton a tentative lead. Overall, her significant lead among superdelegates ensures that she does indeed lead Obama in total delegates to date. RealClearPolitics estimates that Clinton currently has 900 delegates, and Obama 824. That’s without, BTW, any delegates from MI and FL, and with approximately 400 superdelegates remaining undeclared. But want to know how close Super Tuesday really was? A calculation by Tom Schaller (with votes still out, especially in NM) gives Hillary Clinton 50.2% of the total votes cast yesterday, and Barack Obama 49.8%. Now that’s a tie!
On the Republican side, it’s a very interesting situation, that can best be summarized as follows: John McCain looks beatable, but not by either of the actual candidates still in the race. Mitt Romney did well in a handful of western caucuses, but didn’t win a single primary outside MA. And while Mike Huckabee had a very good day, his strength remains isolated in states with large conservative evangelical voting populations. It’s almost impossible to see a “path to the nomination” for anyone other than McCain, though his continuing palpable weakness among self-identified conservatives doesn’t seem to be going away.
I thought it might be useful to look at the results from the point of view of the anticipated story lines I wrote about yesterday:
1) Turnout: Anecdotally, turnout was high yesterday in most of the country, and in both parties, with Democratic turnout once again being far more impressive. It’s difficult, however, to make the sort of comparisons with past turnout levels that were common after IA, NH and SC, for the simple reason that very few Super Tuesday states have had competitive primaries in the recent past. Two that did have significant 2004 Democratic primaries were GA and TN; Democratic turnouout in GA was up by more than 60%, and in TN, by about 50%. BTW, D and R turnout in the Deep South states of GA and AL was roughly even, reversing a recent trend towards much higher GOP turnout.
2) Exit Polls: By the time polls closed in the East, much of the political cognoscenti of the whole wide world had seen early exit polls showing what looked like a very big night for Barack Obama. He appeared to lead in three major states (MA, NJ and AZ) that he ultimately lost, and the margin for HRC in CA grossly undershot the actual vote. Though outside the blogs, political observers were careful not to explicitly report these exit polls, they undoubtedly affected the coverage. Meanwhile, early exit polls for the Republicans appeared to systematically overstate the vote for Mitt Romney, showing him ahead in two states (MO and DE) where he wasn’t ultimately competitive, and suggesting a strong Romney vote in others (e.g., CA, IL and GA) that never actually materialized. This, too, probably influenced coverage as the shank of the evening was dominated by news of one disappointing Romney result after another (indeed, on MSNBC, discussion of whether Romney would withdraw kept getting comically interrupted by “calls” of late caucus states for the Mittster).
3) Expectations: In general, the television networks did a reasonably good job of not letting expectations dominate their interpretation of the results, particularly on the Democratic side. In no small part, that’s because conventional expectations had shifted so rapidly in the runup to Super Tuesday that the media narrative never quite adjusted. Two weeks out, Super Tuesday looked likely to be a Clinton romp, with the big question being whether Obama could win enough delegates to avoid giving HRC a prohibitive lead. But then reports of an Obama Surge in state after state, along with the realization that he would likely win a lot of midwestern and western caucuses, began to shift expectations towards something resembling a draw. A handful of late polls, mostly by Zogby, seemed to suggest the possibility of an Obama “breakthrough,” and that theory was reinforced by the early exit polls. But in the end, a tie was pretty much reported as a tie, with some gabbers viewing this as good news for one candidate or the other. On the Republican side, there was a lot of talk last night about Mike Huckabee’s relatively strong performance, with some suggestions that he had displaced Romney as the main challenger to McCain. But in general, a big step towards the nomination by McCain was the expectation, and nothing happened to unsettle it.
4) Racial/Ethnic/Gender/Partisan Voting Patterns: this was undoubtedly the most complex cluster of story lines for Super Tuesday. The Democratic results, featuring Obama wins in a variety of lily-white caucus states, pretty much reburied the “Obama Can’t Win White Voters” talk that developed just before SC. Obama also appears to have won white voters in CA. There was a burst of early media excitement when the exit polls for GA were released, showing Obama getting over 40% of the white vote there; but right next door, in AL, the vote was more polarized on racial grounds, with Obama’s white vote coming in at 22%. Tons of pre-Super Tuesday buzz suggesed that Obama might be making gains among Latinos, and Clinton’s advantage in that demographic were reduced somewhat in AZ and NM. But in general, she maintained a better than 3-2 margin among Latinos, and attracted a very large Latino turnout in CA, while winning 69% of their votes (an interesting footnote is that a rarely-mentioned racial group, Asian-Americans, went even more heavily for HRC in CA than Latinos, and represented a ;arger percentage of the CA vote than African-Americans). Meawhile, Obama continued to consolidate his hold on African-American voters, scoring in the high 80s among them in GA and AL, and winning more than 60% even in NY, and about 80% in NJ).
Nothing happened on Super Tuesday to disturb the pattern of a sizable gender gap on the Democratic side, with the overall composition of the electorate favoring HRC, or of Obama’s strength among self-identified independents. Obama managed to win the female vote in GA and AL, where he obtained monolithic African-American support, but nowhere else outside of IL in the primary (as opposed to caucus) states. As for the partisan breakdown, Obama comfortably won independents even in states he lost (AZ and CA); in one very tight open primary, MO, Obama won 67% of the indie vote, which made up 22% of the electorate.
Thanks to the closed nature of most of the Republican primaries and caucuses, John McCain continued to overcome the perception that he can’t win without indies. But he also continued to struggle among self-identified conservatives. In IL, which he won with nearly a majority of the vote, he took only 35% of conservatives (Romney won 34% and Huckabee 23%). And in CA, where McCain won 42% overall, he trailed Romney among conservatives by a 39-33 margin.
There are plenty of other dimensions of the Super Tuesday vote I could go into or simply haven’t had time to look at, including age, income, and issue preferences. It’s safe to say, however, that the big story lines: a tie between the Democrats, and slow but steady progress by McCain towards the nomination, are pretty much settled.