Clinton Wins OH, TX, RI & Obama Wins VT & TX Caucuses -- Now What?

Posted by Ashish on 03.05.2008

Analysis on where the race goes from here and why Hillary Clinton is still not back in it...

Hillary Clinton had a big night last night, winning the primaries in Ohio, Texas, and Rhode Island, giving her campaign its best day since winning New Hampshire in early January. Barack Obama won the Vermont primary and the Texas caucuses. So what does this all mean and where does the race go from here?

The major news networks seem to be spinning Clinton's wins as major and seem to be framing the race as a "dead heat" now. While her wins in OH and TX are a very positive sign for her and something she deserves a lot of credit for (let's face it, she and Obama campaigned very hard in both states and she won both, plain and simple), the cold hard facts are that she still has virtually no chance at winning the nomination. The media and the Clinton camp will likely spin this a million different ways in the coming days, but unless she works out some sort of backroom deal to steal the nomination, she will not win it under the current rules. That is just a fact of the math. She needed to win OH and TX by 15-20 points to make any sort of game-changing dent in Obama's pledged delegate lead and despite having 15-20 point leads in both states as recently as two weeks ago, she blew them both and finished up gaining basically nothing except symbolic victories.

Looking ahead, Obama is likely to win Wyoming on Saturday and Mississippi on Tuesday. Then both campaigns put all focus on Pennsylvania which is on April 22nd. Pennsylvania is a closed primary that Clinton should win. But after that, the schedule becomes VERY favorable to Obama. He is likely to rack up several wins and build another long winning streak throughout May (including likely wins in Indiana, North Carolina, West Virginia, Oregon, Montana, and South Dakota). But the night to really watch will be May 6th. May 6th is the next biggest day, delegate wise, as it will feature both North Carolina and Indiana. And guess what? Obama is expected to win both of those easily. I won't go through all the numbers (I have an article up here that give Clinton the benefit in every state going forward and still has her finishing 100+ pledged delegates behind), but under normal assumptions about what will happen from here on out, Obama will have a near 200 pledged delegate lead on May 7th and an even bigger pledged delegate lead when the primary season ends in June. There is virtually no way that superdelegates will overturn a 200+ pledged delegate lead. It just won't happen (unless some sort of major scandal about Obama comes out).

The results of OH and TX remind me a lot of Super Tuesday. On Super Tuesday, Clinton won the big states and the media declared her the night's winner. It wasn't until a few days later that people started realizing that Obama WON the delegate race on Super Tuesday and that was what mattered. Looking at last night's results, Clinton did not really gain any delegates. Rhode Island and Vermont wiped each other out and whatever delegates Clinton gets out of Ohio (likely 7-10) will be wiped out by the delegates Obama wins in Texas (likely 7-10). That means that Clinton is now still just as far behind as she was before, and now has fewer states in which to make up the gap.

But some will argue that she now has the momentum. And that is probably true. She won two big states and deserves the momentum. But guess what? Momentum is only relevant in the short term. Obama will get his own momentum when he wins in Wyoming and Mississippi and then it is a MONTH until Pennsylvania, meaning that whatever momentum either candidate has will long disappear by the time PA votes. And if Clinton wins PA, the schedule again seems to lineup a bunch of favorable Obama states after that.

Clinton will eventually begin to argue that she should get the nomination despite losing the pledged delegates because she won big states. But guess what, the people who have to buy that argument are superdelegates, and most of them are from states that aren't New York and California. She already has most of the "big state" superdelegates. Will superdelegates from smaller states agree that their states don't matter and overturn the election results for Clinton? Highly unlikely.

What will also be interesting to see now is the strategy Obama and Clinton now take. Clinton obviously had some success with her "kitchen sink" strategy of throwing all kinds of attacks at Obama and hoping something sticks (and in the case of Ohio, NAFTAgate stuck). I'd expect them to continue that, especially now with the Rezko trial underway in Chicago. One thing Obama cannot do is sit around and take attack after attack. She made a big issue out of an Obama campaign economic policy guy apparently talking to Canada about some of Obama's views on NAFTA and he seemed to more or less let her say whatever she wanted. He will have to respond quickly and aggressively. He cannot just ignore Clinton. He knows that there is almost no chance that she can win, but ignoring her seems to make him come off arrogant and also serves to fire up her supporters. There will be plenty of time for McCain later.

The other thing to watch now is how superdelegates react this week. Some reports yesterday stated that Obama is sitting on 50 superdelegate endorsements that he has yet to announce. If that is true, and it is a big if, he will be able to halt Clinton's momentum almost instantly. He will also make the math against her winning even more daunting than it already is. I suspect, though, that superdelegates, for the most part, will now stay out of this until May 7th. I'd keep that date in mind because if things go as expected from here until May 7th (Clinton wins PA, Guam while Obama wins Wyoming, Mississippi, North Carolina, Indiana), he will have a clearly dominant pledged delegate lead with only six contests left (four of which he'd likely win -- West Virginia, Oregon, South Dakota and Montana). That is the day I'd expect many superdelegates, including some high ranking members of the party, to begin to solidify behind Obama.

So how can Clinton possibly win? If a major Obama scandal comes out, that could change things. The other scenario is that if she somehow gets Obama's pledged delegate lead down under 100, in which case the Democratic party would probably hold new primaries or caucuses in Florida and Michigan. She still wouldn't be able to make up the pledged delegate gap, but if it's really close, say less than 50, maybe she has some sort of argument to convince some superdelegates to side with her. But this scenario would require that she win EVERY state from now on with 60%+ of the vote. She didn't even win 60% of the vote in her homestate of New York.

So to sum up, winning Ohio and Texas are very positive wins for Clinton. She fought hard for them. But at some point, she will have to explain how she wins the nomination. The fact is that last night was Clinton's best chance to bite into Obama's delegate lead, and she failed miserably. She didn't even gain 20-30 delegates. She gained basically nothing. The media will spin this to her because they jump from one extreme to the next, somebody has to have all the momentum in the weird world of cable news. But the longterm picture is that NOTHING changed last night and, if anything, it is now even harder for Clinton to eat into Obama's delegate lead because she blew her best chance and now has four fewer states in which to gain ground. Don't fall for the short term media hype. At the end of this thing, the media AND the superdelegates will talk NOT about who won what states and how big they are, they will talk about who won more delegates and THAT is the person who will be the nominee. Looking at the delegate count and the upcoming states, there really is no way she wins unless she somehow steals the nomination, in which case none of this matters because the Democratic party would be saying that people's votes don't matter, thus ripping the party apart and handing the November election to John McCain. At this point, she may be positioning herself to get into a position at the end where the party forces Obama to pick her as his Vice President in hopes of uniting the party. Obama probably doesn't want her as his VP, but the longer this goes and the more Clinton supporters begin to dislike Obama (and vice-versa), the more likely it will be that he will have to put her on the ticket to appease her supporters. Even though he is winning, he isn't winning by enough to take the risk of blowing off Clinton supporters and figuring he can win in November without even 20-30% of them.

But Clinton and the media want this to go on, so she bought herself two more months with her wins in OH and TX and on and on we go.