According to Barack Obama, “change is coming to America.” He must not be watching the same nominating contest as the rest of us.
With the Democratic Party having long ago fractured into two warring factions–in this corner, Hillary Clinton’s whiter, older, bluer-collar, more heavily female supporters; in that corner, Obama’s coalition of African-Americans and upscale, metropolitan, progressive Caucasians–any dunce could’ve predicted the outcome of today’s primaries in Oregon (progressive, coastal) and Kentucky (working-class, white) simply by looking at the 2000 U.S. census: Clinton wins down south and Obama wins up north. And in the end, that’s exactly what happened. With returns still rolling in, it appears that Clinton will take the Bluegrass State by 35 points, while Obama will capture the Beaver State by about 16. How… precedented. Makes the endless hours of pontification and prognostication on CNN, Fox News and MSNBC seem sort of pointless, doesn’t it?
The exit polling–a.k.a., what the on-air punditocracy obsesses over when there’s no other news to report–has been just as predictable. In Kentucky, Clinton won the support of 73 percent of white women, 74 percent of low-income whites, 74 percent of whites with no college, 92 percent of experience voters, 65 percent of churchgoers and 78 percent of seniors; in Oregon, where ballots are cast by mail and demographics are tougher to pin down, Obama’s strengths, according to the Associate Press, included young, urban, wealthier and better-educated voters. In other words, little has changed since Texas and Ohio voted on March 4. Move along, folks. Nothing to see here.
Ultimately, tonight was–like the primary in West Virgina last week, or the Indiana-North Carolina doubleheader earlier this month–one more step on Obama’s inexorable march to the nomination. Clinton’s two main claims on the crown–that she’s more electable than Obama, and that she leads in the “popular vote”–are no more compelling now than they were yesterday, or last week, or the week before. Kentucky? Neither Obama nor Clinton stands a chance of winning the state in November; in fact, Obama probably helps his party more in the land of microbrews than Clinton helps in the land of bourbon. And despite declaring in her Louisville celebration speech that “more people have voted for me than for anyone who has ever run for the Democratic nomination,” Clinton is only ahead in a chimerical popular vote that discounts caucus states like Iowa, Nevada, Maine and Washington (where Obama won by overwhelming margins) and includes Florida (where neither candidate campaigned) and Michigan (where Obama wasn’t on the ballot and therefore received a whopping zero votes to Clinton’s 328,309). If you count those caucuses and discount the Great Lakes State–fair concessions by any sane standard–Obama still leads by more than 200,000 votes, even with Florida in the mix. In other words, more people have voted for Clinton than for anyone who has ever run for the Democratic nomination–except for Barack Obama. In either case, the former first lady needs to convince the superdelegates, not us; after all, they’re the only voters left who can help her reach the magic delegate majority of 2,026 (or, with Florida and Michigan, 2,210). Unfortunately, these party poobahs have broken 48-6 for Obama since May 6–and if her lopsided West Virginia victory didn’t do the trick, tonight’s split decision is unlikely to change their minds.
Even the mathematical arguments have become a bit redundant at this point. Heading into today’s contests, Obama was clobbering Clinton by 196 delegates overall, and was only 110 shy of 2,026; after tonight, he’ll probably lead by about 185 and need a mere 65 (compared to Clinton’s 245) to clinch the nomination. What’s more, Obama will also boast a raw majority of pledged delegates–even if Florida and Michigan are factored in. And as we’ve written before, raising the “majority” bar to 2,210 would actually put Clinton further away from clinching the nomination than she is now–meaning that if the Great Lakes and Sunshine State delegations are to be fully seated at the convention, as she wants, the New York senator will have to sway even more of those reluctant superdels. As the original President Bush–i.e. Dana Carvey–once said, “Not gonna do it.”
The night’s most interesting numbers–or at least the most salacious, and therefore most attractive to the talking heads–were the ones from Kentucky purporting to show how deeply divided the Democrats are. According to the exit polls, 92 percent of Clinton supporters said they’d be dissatisfied if Obama were the nominee, and more said they’d support McCain in the fall than said they’d support the Illinois senator. But it’s only natural for such die-hard fans to feel disgusted–as of today, the game was still going full force in their state, so there was no incentive to be anything less than 100 percent loyal. A glance, however, at the latest nationwide Gallup tracking poll–a survey, after all, of Democrats with a little more perspective on the larger battle–tells a different story. Earning 55 percent of the vote to Clinton’s 38, Obama has now tied or surpassed his rival within each of her core constituencies: whites (47-47), women (49-46 Obama), Hispanics (51-44) and voters who never attended college (47-46). As the Atlantic’s Marc Ambinder puts it,“Obama is surging precisely among those voting groups who had resisted his charms to date.” Want to see a party in the early stages of “coming together”? There you have it.
Tonight in Louisville, Clinton vowed to continue until “every vote is cast, and every ballot counted.” No news there–and that’s just as it should be. Clinton’s half of the party–more than 17 million voters–are too invested at this point in resolving the Florida/Michigan dispute and seeing the final states vote for Clinton to even consider dropping out “early”; to do so would merely aggravate her fans and delay the inevitable reunification of the party, which is why her presence through June 3 is actually good for Democrats (so long as she continues to refrain from tearing Obama down). Both candidates are well-aware of that reality. Tonight in Des Moines, Obama gently pivoted to the general election, returning to the state that launched his bid “with a majority of delegates,” “within reach of the Democratic nomination,” and framing “the choice in this election” as a choice between himself and McCain; similarly, Clinton emphasized her determination to keep on keeping on “until we have a nominee, whomever she might be.” But Obama and Clinton also bowed, deeply, graciously and sincerely, in each other’s direction. While Obama praised a rival who had “shattered myths and broken barriers and changed the America in which my daughters and yours will come of age,” Clinton capped her speech with a simple prediction. “We will come together,” she said, “united by common values and common cause… in service of the hopes and dreams that know no boundaries of race or creed, gender or geography. And when we do, there will be no stopping us.”
Above all else, tonight brought the Democratic Party one day closer to that inevitable conclusion.
