TPM Reader HW appeals for calm (and a little common sense) …
This talk of mortal peril for the Democrats is crazy. The idea that where the primary stands here in March jeopardizes the outcome of the election in November strikes me as wildly ahistorical. And I say that as an Obama supporter who believes that Hillary should have gotten out of the race a month ago when the central premise of her campaign became the proposition that superdelegates should overrule the outcome of contested primary elections.
Didn’t Bill Clinton have to fight primary battles well into May and June? He managed to beat an incumbent President a six months laters. Didn’t George W. Bush have to contend with John McCain in 2000 even after Al Gore had basically finished off Bill Bradley early in New Hampshire? Didn’t Jimmy Carter manage to beat Ford despite Jerry Brown winning a string of late primaries in 1976?
As for this latest Gallup poll, if 28% of Hillary Clinton supporters backed McCain, that would mean that roughly 14% of Democrats would back McCain. Given the events of the past week with Jeremiah Wright, McCain’s ability to escape serious examination until the Democratic primary is over, and the heated nature of the primary, let’s call that a worst case scenario. Guess what? Gore lost 14% of Democrats in 2000 and Kerry lost 11% of Democrats in 2004. As I recall, Gore won the popular vote anyway, and John Kerry came pretty close.
We are eight months away from November, we haven’t had a chance to see McCain’s record and statements get serious scrutiny, we haven’t seen the parties choose their respective running mates, we haven’t seen the conventions, we haven’t even officially settled on the matchup (although I think we all know it). Gallup has Obama and McCain basically tied in the mid-forties, which means neither have locked down too many more people than the folks in their base, with everyone in the middle up for grabs. There is much to be written about the general election ahead, in fact, everything has yet to be written. We just all have to have the patience to let Hillary run out the string- and don’t get me wrong, its trying mine, more sorely everyday (my hope is that Obama can stage a double win in North Carolina and Indiana and some party elders will approach Hillary and ask her to pack it in then and there).
Same message from TPM Reader TL (just with a little more edge for the proprietor) …
Don’t you find it incredibly myopic to adhere to the logic behind the figures you posted proporting that many Clinton and Obama voters would vote for McCain after the Dem nominee is chosen? We are in the midst of an incredibly strung out and close race for the Democratic nomination. The emotions running through the supporters of both candidates are near their peak. Of course they are going to claim that they are going to vote for McCain. By saying so they are attempting to make their own candidate seem like the only plausible choice. You know all to well that were Barack or Hillary to win, put beside McCain under the scrutiny of a presidential election, that there is no way in hell any of these people are voting for John McCain. If I want to read/hear this BS I’ll go to CNN, but please not here.
Top Clinton donors write letter chastising House Speaker Nancy Pelosi for her statements about superdelegates.
TPM Reader DW, not so optimistic …
Of course your readers are correct to point out that we are only in March and concern today about the Obama / Clinton fight will spoil November is very premature. Yes, the Clintons in 92 had to beat back Brown into June. But this misses the point.
The problem is, what happens in June? The Clintons have no intention of ever stopping until the delegates nominate them or reject them in Denver (feel free to make the case that Iâm wrong about this). The proper analogy is not 92, but 80 when Teddy took his losing battle to the convention and broke the party. The Clintons are planning their floor fight and not really being very shy about it. It was as recently as this week that Hillary pointed out again that no delegate is pledged â how many times has Harold Ickes reminded us of this fact. Harold Ickes â Teddy Kennedyâs floor manager in 1980.
There is good reason to be very concerned. The biggest problem facing the Democratic party is a leadership vacuum exacerbated by the losers being the Clintons. Who is going to tell the former president come June to STFU and bow out gracefully?
To borrow the Bush/Cheney 2004 slogan, âbe afraid, be very afraidâ.
In that letter to Speaker Pelosi from Sen. Clinton’s top fundraisers, this, the last graf, is the real kicker …
We have been strong supporters of the DCCC. We therefore urge you to clarify your position on super-delegates and reflect in your comments a more open view to the optional independent actions of each of the delegates at the National Convention in August. We appreciate your activities in support of the Democratic Party and your leadership role in the Party and hope you will be responsive to some of your major enthusiastic supporters.
The DCCC is of course the campaign committee that funds and coordinates the Democrats’ House campaigns.
TPM Reader AK, a dear, dear old friend, sees a different explanation …
Forgive me if I missed you saying this on your site, but there’s any easier way than a structural argument to understand why many Clinton supporters say they’ll vote for McCain instead of Obama: Clinton, whom they support, and, one assumes, trust, has told them to do so. She has made the case that the pecking order, particularly when it comes to CIC, is her, then McCain, and Obama failing the threshold test. She has said the same about judgment and experience. This is a case where considering a structural — to use your word — double move is too clever by half. All you need to do is look at what they’re being told by the Clinton camp to understand the polling numbers.
100 years? 1,000 years? 10,000 years!?! Think what you want about who’s being unfair, who should drop and the like in the primary race. The Democrats are missing a big opportunity to strike early at John McCain’s Achilles heel — his lockstep support for an extremely unpopular war. We lay out the key points in today’s episode of TPMtv …
High-res version at Veracifier.com.
This evening everyone is chewing over the results of the latest sounding of the Democratic primary race provided by the new NBC/Wall Street Journal poll. A number of readers, questioning the results of the poll, have written in flagging this passage in NBC’s Chuck Todd’s analysis of the poll …
In addition, we oversampled African-Americans in order to get a more reliable cross-tab on many of the questions we asked in this poll regarding Sen. Barack Obama’s speech on race and overall response to last week’s Rev. Jeremiah Wright dustup.
Given Obama’s overwhelming support among African-American voters, if the poll had a disproportionately large number of African-Americans in its sample, that would definitely throw the results of the poll into question.
But I’m pretty sure that’s not what Todd is saying. What I think he means is this: In order to get a statistically reliable subset of African-American voters, they over-sampled this category. (Remember, African-Americans account for only about 13% of the US population. So that subset of a regular poll doesn’t really have a large enough sample to ensure a low margin of error.) They then re-weighted these results to come up with topline (everybody put together) numbers that adjusted for that oversampling.
Got that?
In any case, I don’t know that. But from my experience I’m pretty sure that’s what it means. I’d be very surprised if a major media outlet would release a poll like this without more clearly flagging that the numbers were skewed. In the meantime, we’ve shot off some emails to people involved with the poll to get confirmation one way or another. We’ll let you know what we hear.
Late Update: A source at NBC confirms that this is correct. The results are weighted, as I described.
Need a supply of mid-20th century Chinese ammo? Maybe some old Eastern Bloc munitions? Then has the Pentagon got a contractor for you: a couple of 20-something dudes in S. Florida who were the main supplier to Afghanistanâs army and police force — until the NYT started asking questions.