Brian Williams is on a serious John McCain flufftacular, circa 10:30 PM.
So here’s a question. Almost 40% of the votes are in in Ohio. And Hillary Clinton has a big 16 point margin which really hasn’t budged much all evening. So why haven’t they called this thing yet? According to Chuck Todd on MSNBC a number of big cities, which are supposed to be Obama strongholds, still haven’t reported yet. Still, he’d have to manage something pretty extraordinary in those jurisdictions to even get this one close.
Late Update: Readers have rightly pointed out that it is, or was, 40% of the precincts, not votes.
Clinton speaking in Ohio. Ohio, Ohio, Ohio.
You have to give Clinton credit. She’s gone a month of crushing defeats. She’s been outspent. The narrative has all been against her. (Not because, like a lot of people think because the press is biased, but because losing breeds negativity.) And Obama charged hard against her in Ohio and Texas, probably coming close to even in Ohio, at some point last week. But she hung in there, threw everything they had at Obama, and she’s pulled this off. She doesn’t give up; she doesn’t quit.
In a day or two, I think those delegate numbers are going to sink in. And her path to the nomination still looks incredibly difficult. But give her her due.
It’s hard to say whether this has any necessary connection to the NAFTA stuff. But a lot of the suspicion in liberal policy circles toward Obama centered on Goolsbee and his positions on Social Security and social insurance generally. What’s ironic about the NAFTA/Goolsbee thing is Clinton’s actually the candidate who’s always been basically pro-NAFTA whereas Obama’s the reverse. So I wonder if having Goolsbee around (who I suspect, based on other policy positions but don’t specifically, is pro-NAFTA) came back to bite Obama.
Late Update: TPM Reader NBL chimes in …
I’m an Ohio native and can tell you that many people I talked to referenced Obama’s ‘double talk’ (their words, not mine) on NAFTA as their reason for switching to Clinton. They said they don’t trust Clinton, but now they don’t trust Obama either. I’ve always wondered what would happen if someone punctured Obama’s aura of integrity and trustworthiness. I guess Ohio gave us the answer. I just never thought it would be someone on his own team that did the puncturing.
My biggest fear now is that the turf wars within the Clinton camp will lead Penn to aggressively push the idea (wrongly) that the ‘3AM’ ad was what put them over the top. If Penn wins the battle of egos, the Clinton campaign could go hardcore negative and end up handing the presidency to McCain. I guess I should expect as much from a campaign built by people (not Clinton, her advisers) who care more about the credit and blame than on what actually works.
p.s: I was raised and went to college in Ohio. For much of that time I worked on local and statewide Democratic campaigns. Trust me when I say NAFTA is a BIG issue among Democrats there.
MSNBC and Fox call Texas for Clinton.
Remember, that’s the popular vote in the primary. That accounts for 126 of the Texas delegates; 67 more are up for grabs in the caucus. The Texas primary has no bonus for getting an overall win. So with the margin this close, that’s probably a tie in delegates — even conceivable that Obama picks up more because of the way the apportionment works. But assume that’s basically a wash. Then there’s the caucus. People assume, though that’s only based on earlier caucuses, that Obama will win there. So keep in mind the very distinct possibility, even a probability, that Obama will take more delegates out of Texas than Clinton, even assuming he narrowly loses the primary part of the contest.
Chuck Todd’s a really good guide to the nitty-gritty of vote totals and delegate distributions. Just a few minutes ago he was giving his latest read on how this all nets out in terms of delegates.
Now, remember one key thing. When people are ballparking delegate distributions they generally take the vote total percentages and assume, for the sake of a rough estimate, that the delegates are distributed roughly in proportion to the popular vote, perhaps with the bonus a given state will use for winning over all. But it doesn’t actually work that way. There are all sort of little details about winning particular congressional districts, or sometimes local legislative districts. And on top of that the delegates often take into account how those jurisdictions voted in previous elections. So the devil’s really in the details.
Todd was just on and said, not surprisingly, that Rhode Island and Vermont (the battle of the New England micro-states) basically cancel each other out. What he seemed quite confident of is even with Clinton’s currently very solid spread in Ohio, she nets only 7 delegates. He seemed pretty solid on that number. So I assume he and his crew had run the numbers on that.
The Texas numbers are still up in the air. But he seemed to be suggesting a possible range from a 4 to a 9 delegate pick-up there.
Put that all together and it seems likely that we’re close to no movement at all on the pledged delegate front, conceivably even Obama picking up delegates, not withstanding losing the popular vote in three of the four states.