It’s time once again to irresponsibly declare a winner! BMG News declares Hillary Clinton the winner of the Texas primary. As of now (58% reporting):
✔Clinton 1,043,832 (51%)
Obama 985,468 (48%)
Also, check out this very interesting map — the real version at CNN is interactive so that if you hover over a county, you get the current vote total from that county.
That seems to confirm the exit poll which shows Obama winning in cities (52-47) and barely winning in suburbs (50-49), but Clinton winning big in rural areas (60-39). Not that I really know where the rural areas in Texas are, or anything. But it sounds good.
UPDATE: Of course, so far we’ve just been talking about the TX primary. Caucus results are just now (12:30 am) trickling in: with 13% reporting, Obama is up 54-46.
MSNBC and CNN (aka Obama News Networks) call the night for Clinton. Very annoying for the talking heads
Looks to me like the game is just beginning.
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p>Rock on Hillary!
WY is a caucus state and a red state, both of which seem to favor Obama. But you never know… March 8th. Mark the date!
Image courtesy Reuters
A smart, decent, lovely woman. Nice of you to bring her back to memory, since I have to have something to assuage the loss to Clinton. Our country lost an irreplaceable treasure when she died. Hey Laurel, how about putting up a picture of Ann.
Obama wins the caucus? I hope not.
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p>”Caucus results … 13% reporting, Obama is up 54-46.”
Democrats demonstrate strength by being the party that is tough enough to withstand this vigorous discussion.
Hillary proves she is intelligent. I was a little worried just now. Fortunatly she won. Some medias say that only her husband could persuade her to withdraw. But this time Hillary proves herself. I think Hillary’s campaign is just like a book’s discription — “An American Journey”: http://dealstudio.com/searchde… , it sounds fantastic! And I do want to see a woman as president in my lifetime!
Geez…I’ve yet to hear any unbiased report that said anything good about the Texas caucuses (that is, anything outside of people saying their caucus went fine because their candidate won). The questions are all over the media: legitimate charges from each campaign, locations with 10% of the required ballots and 1/3 the required space, two hour marathons the day before standardized test day in Texas, police being called to several locations.
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p>I can tell you who lost those caucuses…the Democratic Party of Texas and its members.
I got this email of how his caucus worked out.
Caucuses are perhaps not the best way for Democrats to decide the nominee if there are two or more strongly popular candidates. I am not discounting the results of this year’s caucuses, but I do think the overcrowding is a powerful reason for the D party to just demand primaries in every state next time around. It’s not good to have our people spend long hours waiting to get their say.
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p>It’s better to just walk in, vote, and let the vote totals decide the delegates.
Obviously Clinton deserves congratulations for finally slowing down the Obama juggernaut, and she can claim definite victories here. The problem is that it doesn’t look like she is going to pick up more than a handful of delegates on Obama, and could even end up further behind when the counting is done. That makes it practically impossible for her to make up even half of the pledged delegate difference before the convention, because to do even that she would have to win every remaining race by something like a 20% margin. In order to win she will not only need to do extremely well in every remaining state and also need to convince a supermajority of the remaining undeclared superdelegates to go against the pledged delegates and choose her. That is not going to happen unless some huge scandal emerges from the Obama side.
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p>While I think she has the right to continue to run as long as she wishes, I do hope that she sees the writing on the wall and chooses to drop out on a high note. I don’t expect her to do it right away; her campaign will want to see if today’s results have changed the polls significantly, but I think there is a reasonable chance that she will drop out before PA.
The way this thing is playing out….they both aren’t likely to get to the magic number. What annoys me are the folks that say Hillary should drop out, Hillary should do the right thing…when it’s both of them that have the problem. There’s a reason why we set the bar so high…and yet, the calls for Hillary to step aside and let the golden boy have it has the look and feel of a party willing to reset the bar. I think it’s interesting that only Hillary has to see the “writing on the wall.”
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p>I say – let it go to convention and may the best person win.
…on the wall is for Obama to read. He is a slim front runner with a very worthy oponent nipping at his heels. There is no reason for Clinton to bow out. Pledged delegates are not going to decide this race. Period. End of story. He can’t win with them either. There is no reason to suppose that the person with what may well be only a matter of 50 or 60 more pledged delegates at the end of the day is the presumptive nominee.
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p>Obama was on the Today Show this morning arguing that the person with the most pledged delegates should by rights get the super delegates. This argument is disingenuous. Should Ted Kennedy, Deval Patrick, John Kerry and all of the MA super delegates switch to Clinton because she took the most pledged delegates in MA? Where does the line lie?
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p>Obama is rightfully afraid of the superdelegate contest because this is where one of Clinton’s largest strenghts lie. A lot of the superdelegates have risen with the Clinton tide and there is a lot of loyalty on her side that Obama simply does not have. If she happens to win Wyoming and takes PA like she did Ohio he will be in serious trouble.
Clinton will have to destroy Obama in almost every state to even get within a 50 pledged delegates of Obama. If she does that then she might have a chance of getting enough superdelegates to win. If on the other hand, she is still 150 delegates down, which is quite likely, that would be much harder to make up from the superdelegates, since most of them have already endorsed for one side or the other by now.
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p>I don’t know if I agree with your assertion that “a lot of the superdelegates have risen with the Clinton tide”. There is actually no evidence that any such thing is happening yet, but perhaps it will in the next couple of days or weeks. That is why I don’t think that Clinton is likely to drop out in the immediate future.
…a look at all of the superdelegates and investigate the number of them who filled their campaign coffers with the help of Bill and Hillary. Ain’t hard to do. The Clinton’s have amassed an enormous amount of goodwill in this regard. That goodwill is one of her most valuable assets. Obama simply has next to none. To date he has only helped himself get elected.
and report back to us. I am actually not sure how to go about measuring that number.
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Since the superdelegates actually DO count in this process and many of them have committed, I don’t really take much interest in conversations that ignore them. It’s kind of like the popular vote to me: sure it can be instructive in letting you know how things might go, but in the end the total popular vote isn’t the set of numbers that determines the winner.
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p>So…
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p>CNN currently lists:
Obama with 1451 total delegates
Clinton with 1365 total delegates
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p>Backing out Edwards 26, that leaves a little over 1200 remaining delegates to fight over.
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p>She can get to 2025 with 660 of those.
He can get to 2025 with 574 of those.
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p>Given her ability to stick around and the chance that the media’s love affair will continue to decline, I find it difficult to see the inevitability or even the likliehood that she will drop out before Pennsylvannia. Or should.
The problem is that because pledged delegates are largely allocated by Congressional district, not statewide vote, you have to get a big vote margin in order to win more delegates than the other candidate. For instance, in districts with 4 delegates to give out, you would have to win with about 63% of the vote in order to win 3 out of 4 of the delegates. This is why Clinton is not going to come out with a significant gain in delegates from yesterday’s victories, so unless she can start winning states by 20% or more, like Obama did in a number of those “insignificant states”, then you can pretty much expect the remaining 850 odd pledged delegates to get split down the middle, leaving 350 undeclared superdelegates to fight over.
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p>I think that if she does win the remaining states with margins like that, it would provide enough justification for superdelegates to go against the pledged delegates, so I think that does give her a reason to stay in the race. But she has to start winning the small states. She simply cannot afford to allow Obama to continue to build his delegate lead in these states.
but superdelegates get to decide their vote strategically, and one approach to that is asking, “Can Hillary or Obama win the key states in the Electoral College?”
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p>Ohio, Florida, Pennsylvania are the big three… and Obama didn’t get it done in Ohio. Maybe if he can win Florida’s do-over, he’ll be able to convince superDs who use the above criterion.
This DailyKos diary has a good analysis of the remaining states broken down by delegates per congressional district. It explains why Clinton needs blowouts to make dent in Obama’s pledged delegate lead.
It’s the Jerry Jeff Walker political machine at work!