Re: The media, as usual, is watching the wrong tally
by
dsimon
05/12/2008, 4:58 PM #
The primary is still too close to call
Not if you do the math. Even if she does extremely well in the remaining contests, she's going to need something like 70% of the remaining superdelegates, which is over a 2:1 break (closer to 3:1). Possible, but highly unlikely.
Hillary still beats him 2 to 1 in electoral votes, and this, as any
voter or student of recent American electoral history knows, is
actually where the winner is determined, or not, in Sen. Obama's case.
But any serious student of politics should know that primary results don't predict general election results. The fact is that in head-to-head polls against McCain, Obama is up in NY, up in CA, up in NJ--all states that Clinton "won" against Obama. When November comes around, most Clinton primary voters will vote for the Democratic nominee, no matter who it is.
The Clinton campaign has consistently put forward the specious claim that how A does against B tells us something about how A or B will do against C. But it doesn't. If the argument is that Clinton will do better than Obama against McCain in various states, then the place to start looking is head-to-head polling data against McCain in those states, not the results of Clinton against Obama. The Clinton campaign doesn't point us towards those numbers--possibly because they don't show much if any advantage for Clinton over Obama.
So instead they use "electoral vote" numbers for primaries which have no validity in transferring them to the general election against a completely different opponent. I understand the Clinton camp is running out of arguments, but it doesn't excuse them from using ones that are purposely misleading.