Charlie Cook has a lucid analysis on the post-Pennsylvania state of the Democratic Party’s nomination fight: Hillary’s Political Purgatory
Clinton has spent the past six weeks in a horrible situation. How do you quit a race when you’re still winning primaries? The delegate and fundraising pictures looked dismal to the point of near-impossibility, yet she was still taking the big primaries. There was really no way she could have stood on the podium in Philadelphia on Tuesday night and said, “Thank you, Pennsylvania, for this great victory. Oh, by the way, I’m now dropping out.”
As long as Clinton is winning, she can’t quit. But even in victory, she isn’t getting any closer to securing the nomination. This political purgatory will continue if she manages to win Indiana but loses North Carolina—hard to drop out but harder to see winning the nomination. If she loses in both states, then her campaign’s donors and creditors, as well as superdelegates and party leaders, are likely to intervene. But that can’t happen as long as she continues to win.
Indeed.
Another point that directly struck me:
The Clinton folks shouldn’t be faulted for the arguments they are making: In the big states that will determine the final outcome in November, she has done better than Obama
Yet, the party (indeed, both parties) continue to insist that several small states should go first,1 and have a wholly disproportionate influence on the process.
Along these lines (specifically of the sequence in which these contests take place), Henry Farrell (blogging at the Monkey Cage) notes a paper on this subject (Momentum and Social Learning in Presidential Primaries [PDF] by Brian Knight and Nathan Schiff) which notes in the abstract:
The empirical application focuses on the responses of daily polling data to the release of voting returns in the 2004 presidential primary. We find that Kerry benefited from surprising wins in early states and took votes away from Dean, who held a strong lead prior to the beginning of the primary season. The voting weights implied by the estimated model demonstrate that early voters have up to 20 times the influence of late voters in the selection of candidates, demonstrating a significant departure from the ideal of “one person, one vote.”
Such a finding will, no doubt, frustrate Clinton supporters greatly, given that it underscores that if there order of voting had been different, she would likely be winning. Of course, that is hardly a shocking conclusion.
Sphere: Related Content- Indeed, to the point that the Michigan and Florida voters got the shaft. [↩]
April 24th, 2008 at 8:04 am
Clinton’s argument is really specious. It is based on the assumption that a primary is the same as a general election–that if you can’t win the state in a Democratic primary, you will necessarily lose it in the general.
The NYTimes has an article today looking at polling data suggesting that many of her voters in key state will vote for Obama in the general.
Does anyone really think that Hillary is going to win Texas because she won the Dem primary? Is Obama going to lose California to McCain? Would Hillary lose Illinois to McCain?
It’s just a stupid argument. Generals and primaries are different animals. Obama also has much more potential of shifting the Western electoral map–particularly with states like Colorado.
April 24th, 2008 at 8:09 am
I utterly agree with your critique: it makes no sense to argue that the primary outcomes have anything to do with what will happen in November.
However, the irony (to me, anyway) is that if the primary process had started with Ohio, Texas, PA and the like, instead of Iowa, NH and such and a bunch of small states that Obama won, the overall outcome of the process would likely have been different.
A side note: regardless of any of that, I think that Obama has a better chance of winning in November than does Clinton (although overall I think that the Dems will win regardless).
April 24th, 2008 at 9:24 am
This is a good point - while she really doesn’t have a shot to win (at least in a way that doesn’t make Obama’s supporters cry foul and be less energized for the general), as long as she’s winning, there is no reason for her to quit. It is a situation that can happen here . . . . in the Twilight Zone.
April 24th, 2008 at 10:28 am
[...] is the John Stewart version (after a fashion) of the Charlie Cook column I noted earlier this [...]
April 24th, 2008 at 4:53 pm
Actually, while it may have been “accidental” this year the Dems provided for as close to a national primary as one has ever seen in the USA. It is because of the clustering of early contests (especially 5 Feb.) and because of proportional allocation that this is a battle for every delegate and not for specific states (whether small, big, swing, or whatever).
It is the GOP that has selected a process that gave disproportionate influence to selected states, but those were not the small states. They were all the big winner-take-all states that one candidate happened to win, often narrowly, so that the party’s race ended at a moment in which its apparent nominee had yet to break 40% of the votes cast cumulatively (and a moment in which the runner up was only a few percentage points of the vote behind, but way behind in delegates).
April 24th, 2008 at 5:02 pm
On the abstract quoted: I would not assume that this result from 2004 is applicable in 2008 for the Democrats.
April 24th, 2008 at 8:36 pm
I take the basic point, but in general it seems clear to me that sequencing matters–so that even with the proportional allocation of delegates per state, you still effect the way candidates campaign and voters vote.
As such, I think that primary sequencing creates a psychological effect within the nomination process.
And yes, I think that such effects would have been more pronounced in 2004 for obvious reasons.
April 25th, 2008 at 1:29 pm
Of course the sequencing matters–if the early states are different in a fundamental way from the party’s constituency as a whole. If Dean or Gephardt could have won Iowa, I think a case could be made that Kerry would not have been nominated in 2004. I just do not think that was the case in 2008. And here is where the PR matters more than the sequencing. PR kept Clinton from slamming the door and winning by mid March. I think almost any imaginable sequence this year (with the delegate rules the party actually has) would have produced a quick convergence around Obama as the one stop-Clinton candidate. But winner take all would have almost certainly given Clinton the nomination by now.
My basic point here refers to the underlying structure of competition. Usually, at the beginning, there are either several candidates with none clearly in the lead, like the GOP this year, or there is one dominant (but not majority) candidate, and a lot of challengers. In that structure, I can see sequencing making a big difference. But this race became so quickly a two-person race (despite PR!) that it just seems that an argument based on 2004 (or 1992 or almost any other year) would be suspect.
I have often speculated on whether Edwards could have stuck around longer if the Michigan and Florida primaries–on their early dates–had been fully contested. Maybe, but I think there was a pretty clear hunger within a lot of the party for “anybody but Clinton.” I do not mean to demean “my”candidate for all his considerable appeal and skill. All I mean is that any imaginable sequence would have pushed Obama into the role of the HRC challenger. Yet with WTA, she’d still be in (especially with two opponents, as was the case with McCain on the other side), but with PR she still could have been caught (even with two opponents at the outset).
Ah, there is nothing I love more than a good counterfactual!
April 25th, 2008 at 3:35 pm
We fundamentally agree.
However, take Michigan and 2008 and the sequencing issue (as well as the kowtow to Iowa/NH issue). If the candidates didn’t feel the need to kowtow to Iowa, since they are “special” and get to go first, there wouldn’t have been the need to punish Michigan (and, indeed, Obama and Edwards wouldn’t have taken their names off the ballots).