Hillary Clinton’s latest strategy to receive the Democratic nomination for president is to emphasize her electability by white voters. Look at her huge margin of victory in West Virginia as well as in all of the recent primaries amongst hard-working white voters.
Obama won in largely white rural states with Caucuses like Nebraska by sheer dint of organization and tactics. The argument is that he can’t win those places in a general election and he only won because the contests were caucuses.
The Wall Street Journal puts it like this:
For evidence of the strategy that has made Barack Obama the likely Democratic presidential nominee, look at Nebraska, where the candidate narrowly won a little-noticed primary Tuesday.
Sen. Obama’s 49% to 46% victory barely got any attention from the campaigns or the press, because the state’s delegates, who vote on the nomination, were chosen in a February caucus. In that contest, where turnout was less than half that of the primary, Sen. Obama won in a 68% to 32% blowout and picked up a net eight delegates — one more than Sen. Hillary Clinton later gained from her big win in the much bigger state of Ohio.
The contrasting Nebraska votes help illustrate how Sen. Obama has done a better job than Sen. Clinton of working low-turnout caucuses for big results, even as she racked up primary wins in some of the largest states.
Open Meetings
Of the 19 state and territory caucuses held since Iowa’s kickoff event in January, Sen. Clinton has won only three. Sen. Obama has picked up a net 145 delegates out of the caucuses, which are open meetings where voters gather to nominate delegates to state conventions, as opposed to ballot-box primaries. That’s 95% of his current lead of 152 among delegates chosen by popular votes.
The Democratic Party awards delegates proportionally, which means that landslide wins, even in small states, often yield more delegates than close wins in large states. Sen. Clinton won the April 22 Pennsylvania primary by 200,000 votes and picked up a net gain of 10 delegates. Sen. Obama won the Feb. 5 Idaho caucus by 13,000 votes and picked up a net 12 delegates.
The Clinton campaign, frustrated by those rules, has continued to promote the view that Sen. Clinton would win more votes in a general election than Sen. Obama would, despite his lead in the delegate race.
The Clinton campaign says the party’s nomination system places undue weight on low-turnout caucuses they consider undemocratic. Many don’t use secret ballots and are held at fixed times, skewing turnout toward party activists and against working people, mothers, military personnel and others who can’t spare one or two hours to attend a caucus, they say.
“Obama’s lead hinges on rules that are written in a way that will not produce the strongest candidate in the general election,” says Sean Wilentz, a Princeton history professor and Clinton supporter.
“These aren’t our rules, they’re the DNC rules and rather than whining about them they should have started organizing,” says Obama campaign manager David Plouffe, referring to the Democratic National Committee.
Two states in addition to Nebraska have held both a primary and a caucus. In Texas, where both were used to allocate delegates, Sen. Clinton won the state’s primary, which drew nearly three million voters, by four percentage points. That same day she lost by 12 points the state’s caucus, which drew an estimated one million voters. Sen. Clinton won a net gain of four delegates in the primary, but lost an estimated nine delegates in the caucus.
While this argument is unlikely to sway super delegates whose votes will determine the race, it explains why Clinton has been saying for months that she is more ‘electable’ than Obama. It also gives her the right to say I told you so if Obama loses in November because of this.
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