Convention Math: Clarifying the Caucus-State Confusion

Josh put a post up in the wee hours of the morning examining the intricacies of delegate selection in caucus states. The main thrust of the piece was that since delegates have yet to be fully allocated in the caucus states, there's still significant room for on-the-ground maneuvering, which might ultimately lead to swings as large as "twenty to thirty" new delegates. I'll admit that there's still some uncertainty regarding a portion of these delegates, but much of the speculation in the post seems rather more breathless than the facts appear to justify.

Now one of the things I love about Josh is that he's always careful to hedge when he wanders beyond the bounds of his own expertise, and he flags those elements of his posts that are speculative or that rely on information obtained from others. It's probably a vestige of his academic training, but whatever the cause, it elevates him above a lot of other bloggers who are considerably less careful concerning facts. So it's not Josh with whom I'm taking issue here, but rather, the sources he cites in his post.

There's also been a fair amount of speculation along similar lines in recent days. The Associated Press put out a story back in February focusing on the caucus issue, particularly the process in Nevada; diarists at DailyKos have been waxing incandescent about the goings-on in Colorado; Iowa is still up in the air; and right here at TPM Cafe we've seen some conspiratorial thinking about Texas. So it would seem to be time for yet another long-winded, overly detailed post detailing the surpassingly strange Democratic nomination process.

Let's start by noting that not all caucus states are created equal. They fall, broadly speaking, into three general categories (plus Texas, which as usual, does things in its own special way). In the first category, nothing's definitively settled until the state convention (e.g., AK, CO, IA, ME, and NV). Most of the room for maneuver comes in this small handful of states, which will ultimately hand out 162 pledged delegates. In their systems, hundreds or thousands of delegates elected at the precinct level, many of whom have little prior experience and are all-but-unknown to the campaigns, have to show up at the caucuses at the next level and vote the way they pledged in order for the initial results to be translated into strength at the state conventions. We're already seeing some signs that in Colorado the Clinton campaign is enjoying somewhat more success at this task than Obama's folks.

But that's just one category. The second uses the actual vote tallies at the precinct level to apportion its district-level delegates, some two-thirds of the pledged delegation. The caucuses also elect delegates to state conventions, sometimes via a multi-tiered process, who then choose the statewide delegates (or, in the case of Washington State, it's the district-level delegates to the DNC who make the selection). So it's possible that poor attendance or faithless delegates could affect the apportionment of the statewide delegates in these states, albeit unlikely. Overall, 95 of the pledged delegates in these states are already locked down by binding rules, and 51 are technically still in play (KS, NE, WA, WY).

The AP story glosses over the third category - states in which the allocation of every pledged delegate is determined by the initial vote, and in which all that's left for the state conventions (where they are held) is to determine the identity of the delegates, not their allegiances (e.g, AS, HI, ID, MN, ND, VI). There are 129 pledged delegates from these states, all of whom will be allocated in accordance with the vote tallies.

Texas, of course, is sui generis - its rules mandate that the delegates selected at the county/senate district conventions reflect the presidential preferences of voters at the precinct level, but then allow those delegates to vote as they please at the state convention. And of course, there's an outside chance of some shenanigans in the Lone Star State because the vote tallies at the precinct level, though binding, weren't centrally recorded. But on the whole, the incomplete tallies we have are likely to be highly predictive of the ultimate allocation of the 67 pledged national delegates, both because we have no reason to presume them to be an unrepresentative sample, and because only the (much smaller number of) delegates to the state convention are allowed the freedom to vote as they please. That makes it easier for the campaign to vet the folks they'll back for those slots, and to keep tabs on them moving forward.

So when Hillary blithely uses the term caucus delegates, she's lumping together some radically different processes. The 72 pledged delegates from Minnesota, for example, are no more in doubt than the 72 pledged delegates from Missouri - all were fully allocated on February 5. (That's reason enough to conclude that's she's challenging their legitimacy, and not making a procedural distinction.) None of the 45 from Iowa, however, have yet been allocated. To be sure, it's always wise to take any of these tallies with a grain of salt before the totals are officially certified. But I can't see any valid reason to distinguish between Minnesota and Missouri at the moment.

If you add up all the caucus-state delegates, you find that 224 have been locked down, with 280 technically still in play. But it's in the first of our three categories, among the five states with 162 delegates, that we're most likely to see swings. Let's dismiss the notion that "twenty to thirty" delegates might be in play - the only way to get a tally anywhere close to that number is to count the 14 Iowa delegates that Edwards' share of the vote suggested he would claim. And it's not at all clear that his backers intend to relinquish those slots. The Colorado experience is instructive in this regard - one county showed a five-point swing toward Hillary, another a four-point gain, and a third ran true to the precinct results. A two- or three-point swing statewide for Hillary would enable her to take a delegate from Obama; a five- or six-point swing would allow her to take two. And that in the largest of the undetermined states. We're just not talking about huge numbers of delegates, and it's unclear that the dynamic will favor Hillary across the board. Of course, there's another dimension to these defections. If Hillary or Obama were to garner more than 50% of the state convention delegates in any caucus state, including those in which the pledged delegates are already locked down, they'd be able to win that state's UADs. But the margins in the caucus states make that even more unlikely than a significant swing in pledged delegates.

The bottom line is that the possibility of faithless delegates is the sort of process story that makes political reporters and insiders salivate, but is extremely unlikely to happen. (I'll qualify that by saying that if the race is effectively over by the time state conventions meet, as it was in 1984, we could see some substantial number of defections.) Both sides, to be sure, have to turn out their supporters and do their homework in selecting higher-tier delegates. But there's no indication that either campaign will fail egregiously in that task, and despite all the jockeying, we'll probably see less overall delegate movement here than we saw in the primary state of California.

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The Perils of Indecision: How Clinton Cost Herself the Race

Hillary Clinton's latest gambit is raising eyebrows across the political spectrum today. In an interview with Newsweek, Clinton explained that the electoral math:

...doesn't look bleak at all. I have a very close race with Senator Obama. There
are elected delegates, caucus delegates and superdelegates, all for different
reasons, and they're all equal in their ability to cast their vote for whomever
they choose. Even elected and caucus delegates are not required to stay with
whomever they are pledged to. This is a very carefully constructed process that
goes back years, and we're going to follow the process.

There's so much packed into that short paragraph that it's necessary to unwrap it at some length. Let's begin with the latest Clintonian coinages of elected delegates and caucus delegates. It's a clear effort to advance the notion that the primary contests are inherently more legitimate than caucuses. I've done my best to bat down these sorts of invidious distinctions before, but it seems each week the Clinton campaign rolls out a new means of adding up the votes to produce a clear edge for Hillary. Rather than recapitulate those arguments, I'll simply say that the rules vary more between some primary states than they do between some of those states and firehouse caucus states, making these groupings rather arbitrary; that any representative system will fail to produce a perfect translation of the popular vote; and that complaining about the rules only when they prove inconvenient is hardly an honorable tactic, and can only serve to undermine the legitimacy of the eventual outcome. At any rate, I suspect that caucus delegates will soon be consigned to the same fate as automatic delegates, a nomenclature that even Clinton has evidently already abandoned.

The real stunner here is Clinton's blithe assertion that pledged delegates and superdelegates are "all equal in their ability to cast their vote for whomever they choose." For the most part, she's absolutely right about that. But it's not an idle observation, it's an apparent appeal for their support. And that's a line which no recent candidate has been willing to cross - enticing delegates pledged to support a candidate to abandon that pledge. In the next breath, Clinton vows to "follow the process." There's a narrow legalism to this approach, a willful disregard for the spirit of the rules coupled to a faithful adherence to their letter.

In this case, I rather doubt Clinton is contemplating a serious run at the pledged delegates. Those folks have been carefully vetted by the campaigns, and are unlikely to prove faithless in any significant number. It is, instead, yet another effort to soften the ground for the superdelegates. She is attempting to reframe the debate. It's not that Obama will enter the convention with a triple-digit pledged delegate lead, Clinton's suggesting; rather, when 4,048 delegates convene in Denver, we shouldn't consider any of them really committed to either candidate. All the delegates are ultimately free to vote as they please. So if when the votes are cast, Obama happens to garner more support among pledged delegates and Hillary a decisive edge among the superdelegates, then that's just the way things fall out. No one overturned a pre-existing outcome - it was all up in the air until that final vote. Her caucus vs elected distinction likewise seems aimed at persuading superdelegates that if they squint hard enough, they can still see Hillary holding on to some sort of lead, and that their votes for her would really be ratifying the popular will and not overturning it.

But as easy as it is to pick on Clinton for her endless attempts to reframe the process in her own favor, I think that such an approach misses something significant in her argument. Hillary is genuinely, thoroughly distrustful of the caucus process. At the urging of her advisors, she swallowed her misgivings and campaigned in Iowa. Her defeat in Iowa left her feeling burned, and confirmed her doubts. She had, reports the Washington Post, "become allergic to caucuses, deeming them unfair." That aversion, as much as anything else, is the reason why Clinton now finds herself facing an all-but-insurmountable chasm among the convention delegates.

For that reason alone it would be important to understand the origins of Clinton's self-defeating disdain for caucuses. It's not solely an instrumental position, nor (contra the Post) is it an expression of her pique at being spurned in Iowa. The truth is more nuanced. Hillary was not willing to roil voters in those states when her nomination appeared inevitable by using her substantial clout on the DNC Rules Committee to eliminate caucuses, nor to mandate changes to their procedures, back when the primary rules were being debated and enacted. When she thought she could win in Iowa, she poured time and resources into the state, never uttering a word about her dislike for its process. In Nevada, she held her fire until the Culinary Workers endorsed her rival, and then focused her ire on the at-large caucus sites, which (somewhat ironically) were designed to remedy many of the inequities she decried. But it seems fairly clear that her distaste for the caucus system is genuine, and deeply rooted.

My problem with Clinton's present approach is that she has crossed over from critiquing a system she dislikes to attempting to subvert it. It's instructive, in this regard, to recall her response to an earlier electoral controversy. In the fall of 2000, it became clear that although Al Gore had won the popular vote, he was likely to lose narrowly in the electoral college. At the time, more than a few activists suggested a simple means of reversing the outcome - persuade three electors to switch their votes. The most prominent advocate of this solution was Mario Cuomo, who observed: "Why should [Gore] concede as long as it’s still possible that electors might change their mind, which they’re free to do?"

But Cuomo was pretty much alone among prominent Democrats. Gore himself repeatedly said that he would not encourage any electors to switch their votes. It remained, for the most part, an expression of grass-roots frustration. Senator-elect Hillary Rodham Clinton entered the fray just a few days after the election. On Nov. 10, she told an upstate NY audience:

I believe strongly that in a democracy, we should respect the will of the
people. And to me that means it's time to do away with the Electoral College and
move to the popular election of our presidents. And particularly in this
situation where we have a popular vote total that favors the Vice President, I
think it sends a message to everyone. Many of us who have run for office in this
last election have spent a lot of time telling people their votes would count.
... We need to make it clear that your vote counts and that the total votes cast
for a person running for president in our country should determine the outcome.

Let's set aside, for a moment, the delicious irony of a woman about to take her seat in the United States Senate, perhaps our system's most extreme expression of republican distrust for popular democracy, decrying the inequities of a system that stands in the way of the people's will. We'll set it aside because, as best I can tell, Clinton was perfectly sincere. Then, as now, she distrusted processes that failed to embrace the popular vote. For all that, she never took the next step. She never crossed the line and encouraged electors to switch sides. In fact, less than two weeks after her initial assault on the electoral college, she backtracked on a pledge to make its abolition the subject of her first bill, calling the idea unlikely to be successful and opting to focus instead on reforming the electoral machinery to ensure more accurate vote counting.

Back in 2000, Clinton seemed to understand that the integrity of our Democratic system is more important than the outcome of any given election. The time to challenge its legitimacy or to reform its byzantine processes is between elections, not halfway through them, or after their results appear to be distasteful. In her seven years in office, Clinton never did follow through on her initial pledge to discard the electoral college. Her work on voting reform never extended to the primary system. She never pushed the DNC to change its guidelines. She never spoke out before Iowa against the caucuses, nor did she choose to boycott the process in that state. Last week, she decided to (once again) swallow her objections and to campaign full-bore in Wyoming, even as she continued to mock the caucus system there.

This morning, The New York Times ran a remarkable piece on the dissension within the Clinton campaign:

Mrs. Clinton accepted or seemed unaware of the intense factionalism and feuding
that often paralyzed her campaign and that prevented her aides from reaching
consensus on basic questions like what states to fight in...

One pundit they quote was considerably less charitable:

It’s a legitimate question to ask: Under great pressure from two different
factions, can she make some hard decisions and move ahead? It seems to just
fester. She doesn’t seem to know how to stop it or want to stop it.

Hillary's approach to the caucus system suggests that Thurber is closer to the mark. Had she trusted her own instincts, and either pushed the DNC to change the rules or skipped Iowa entirely, she'd probably have locked up the nomination by now. If, instead, she'd followed Ickes' advice and competed vigorously in caucus states, the outcome would have been the same - smaller margins for Obama producing a Clinton lead. But by vacillating between the two approachs - by competing in Iowa and Nevada, then not in other caucus states, then again in Wyoming - Clinton has transformed her nomination from inevitable to improbable.

But it's not her failure as a manager that's ultimately to blame for her defeat. Clinton knew her own mind on the subject, and voiced her opinions as far back as 2000. Had she followed through on her misgivings, she would have won. Had she set them aside to fight the election on its own terms, she would have won. Instead, she vacillated. Not because her staff pulled her in opposite directions, and not because she was unaware of the conflict. Those were the symptoms of her indecision; we ought not mistake them for its cause. She vacillated because she did not know her own mind. And that inability to choose a position and stick to it will ultimately cost her this race.

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Convention Math: Remember the UADs!

A reader's comment on my last post sent me back to the ever-exciting topic of Unpledged Add-On Delegates (UADs). Those who have suffered through my previous explorations of the subject will recall that UADs are the forgotten superdelegates - the 76 bonus delegates awarded to the states. It turns out that they were dreamt up by Tad Devine in 1988, as a means of rectifying Jesse Jackson's gripe that he was winning states but only splitting their delegates. The original idea was that UADs would be awarded in each state as an extra bonus to the winner of the popular vote. Somewhere along the way, however, UAD allocation was largely divorced from the popular vote. Today, states follow a wide variety of methods for awarding their UADs (see my previous posts for more).

So who cares? Well, I do. And I hope you will, as well. But not, as best I can tell, the national media. The delegate calculators out there seem blissfully unaware of the UADs, lumping them in with the other superdelegates as if they're just sitting on the fence. Most projections I've seen do the same. This is problematic. To the best of my knowledge, only two UADs have been selected thus far, and so they're the only ones being included in most counts of superdelegates. But it's fallacious to think that the UADs will choose between the two candidates; rather, the UADs will all be chosen based on their public backing for one or the other. They don't fall into the pool of undecided superdelegates, and claiming they do makes that pool seem larger and more influential than it is - and, as it happens, makes a Clinton comeback seem plausible, when it's not.

Witness last week's fight over UADs in Alabama, one of the states in which the state executive committee makes the decision. Each campaign selected a single, loyal backer, and ran him as their candidate. Obama controlled six more votes than Hillary, and so his man won the slot. There was no sense in which this delegate was unpledged; in fact, he was vetted at least as carefully as any of the pledged delegates on Obama's slate. We're going to see the same in every state that awards UADs. Given that some of these will be awarded by a vote of a body whose composition is already a matter of public record - a state convention, the members of the DNConvention delegation - we can actually be as certain of these UADs votes as of those of their pledged peers, even if we don't yet know their names.

Here's a quick rundown of UADs in states that have already voted:

Clinton Obama Undetermined

IA: 0 0 1
NH: 0 0 1
NV: 1 0 0
SC: 0 0 1
AL: 0 1 0
AK: 0 1 0
AR: 1 0 0
AZ: 0 0 1
CA: 5 0 0
CO: 0 1 0
CT: 0 0 1
DE: 0 1 0
GA: 0 0 2
ID: 0 1 0
IL: 0 3 0
KS: 0 1 0
MA: 0 0 2
MN: 0 2 0
MO: 0 0 2
ND: 0 0 1
NM: 0 0 1
NJ: 0 0 2
NY: 0 0 4
OK: 0 0 1
TN: 0 0 2
UT: 0 1 0
WA: 0 2 0
NE: 0 1 0
LA: 0 0 1
ME: 0 1 0
DC: 0 1 1
MD: 0 0 2
VA: 0 2 0
HI: 0 0 1
WI: 0 0 2
OH: 0 0 2
RI: 0 0 1
TX: 0 3 0
VT: 0 1 0

TOTAL: 7 23 32

So the states that have already held their initial contests award 62 of the 76 superdelegates. About half of those delegates have been or will be selected by bodies whose allegiances are already known, allowing us to predict that Obama will take 23 UADs to Hillary's 7. Obama's substantial lead in the category is based on two factors - he's won many more states, and more of the states he's won use caucuses or other processes that allow us to predict the selection of UADs.

Now, there are good reasons not to attempt to predict how the remaining UADs will be awarded. The Alabama fight demonstrates that the Clinton campaign isn't about to cede UAD slots even in states it lost, and if it's going to fight, it seems likely Obama's camp will, too. In some states, that's unlikely to matter. It seems reasonable to suppose that all 4 New York UADs will go to Hillary. But do Massachusetts' senators and governor have enough clout on the state committee to secure both of that state's UADs for Obama? Perhaps. And will Hillary's institutional support in states like Hawaii bring her a UAD where it failed to deliver a caucus? Could be. These things bear watching.

Nevertheless, it seemed a worthwhile exercise to award all 62 of these UADs by giving the remaining 32 to the candidates who won their respective states. If you do that, Obama wins them 38-24. That suggests what a headache the UADs are likely to become for the Clinton campaign if she stays in the race. As things stand, they widen Obama's lead by 16 delegates; and if things play out along the most likely lines, that lead would still stand at 14. (The remaining contests are likely to have about as much impact on the margins in the UAD battle as on those of the rest of the delegate tally - which is to say, little or none.) To put that in perspective, Clinton leads the overall superdelegate tally this morning, 241-198. Add in the UADs whose commitment have been determined, and that shrinks to 248-221. Even if she enjoys some success at grabbing UADs from states that Obama has won, she faces an uphill battle - almost all of Obama's likely UADs are already locked down, and almost all of Hillary's have yet to be determined. And to offset each UAD in that Obama lead, Hillary needs to win another pledged delegate or superdelegate to her cause.

So add this to the long (and lengthening) list of reasons why the numbers just don't add up for a Clinton nomination. And every time you see a tally of the 794 superdelegates, look closely to see how it treats the 76 UADs. These procedural details matter more than most people think - by mastering them, the Obama campaign has built a clear lead despite the remarkably even split between the campaigns at the polls.

If you've enjoyed this, please share it with other readers by clicking the 'recommend this' link. You can find more analysis on my blog. As always, I welcome comments and corrections. And thanks to all who have responded, and to the GhostInTheMachine and IrishTrojan blogs for linking to these posts.

Wednesday Morning Questions (and Answers)

1) What's changed in the past 24-hours?

Nothing. And everything.
Yesterday, Obama had a chance to end the fight for the Democratic nomination, and Hillary faced elimination. By winning three out of the four states, Hillary seems to have convinced the punditry that she remains viable, if only barely. We now face a long and increasingly-bitter fight, as Clinton ramps up attacks on Obama. That's a big change from the relatively-civil battle we'd witnessed until the last few days, and if the contest really drags on for another seven weeks, that's also significant.
On the other hand, when the dust settles, it looks as if any changes in the delegate count will be negligible. Just a few weeks ago, the Clinton campaign was talking about narrowing the overall delegate gap to 25, pulling even, or even taking the lead on the strength of the March 4 vote. Depending on the count, the actual lead will remain somewhere around 80 delegates in most leading tallies - or just over 100, using the Obama campaign's count that fully allocates the delegates. Running out the clock is never a good way to win, but every contest that passes with that lead intact is a major blow to Clinton's aspirations.

2) Did Clinton "win back her base" last night in Ohio? Did Obama "cut into Clinton's base" in Vermont?

How to put this? No.
One of the challenges of covering the long series of contests in the Democratic nominating process is assembling a cohesive narrative out of discrete events. Sometimes, that makes a great deal of sense. In 2004, we watched John Kerry's momentum build state-by-state, as his performance in one round boosted his viability in the next. That's one reason pundits like to speak about such elusive things as momentum. The problem is that we're comparing unlike quantities. Obama, for example, has won better than 80% of the black vote in every contest since Georgia. But his share of white male voters has varied widely. There's a temptation to over-interpret those facts - to suggest that when his share surges upward, he holds more appeal for white men, but that Clinton's recent attacks have eroded that support. The difficulty is that we're not talking about the same people. There's every reason to believe that had Wisconsin not held its election until yesterday, it still would have delivered a substantial margin for Obama, even as Ohio went solidly for Hillary. The two states are quite different - driven by different issues, inhabited by populations of different socio-economic statuses, and traditionally supportive of different sorts of candidates. Conversely, had New Jersey decided to take part in the Potomac Primary, geography be damned, it would almost certainly have tipped toward Hillary anyway, even as three other contests went for Barack.
The headlines this morning all speak of Hillary reassembling her coalition or reclaiming her base, but there's no reason to believe that voters in Ohio ever left her, or that they needed to be reclaimed. In fact, the polls taken over the past month tell a different story; that Obama cut into some of her key constituencies, but not enough to win, and saw some of his gains slip away in the final days. Obama's sole triumph of the evening, in Vermont, is a similar case - he didn't have to win voters over, they'd been backing him for as long as pollsters have been asking the question.
There's another way to look at last night's results. It would appear that the Democratic primary electorate is fairly evenly divided along some fairly consistent lines. With the exception of black voters, however, monovariate explanations fall short. In other words, predicting outcomes typically means combining various traits of the electorate. It's not enough to say that Obama is likely to do better among men, even though that may be true; we have to say that Obama tends to take white men in northern states with at least a college education, and that his share of their votes increases as educational attainment and income levels rise, but falls with advancing age. We might add that he does best in this group in states where blacks comprise less than 5% of the population.
Suddenly, momentum all but vanishes. In national polls, Hillary Clinton has garnered astonishingly consistent levels of support for more than a year, almost always falling in the range of 40-45%. Obama's support has steadily risen since Iowa, as he's introduced himself to voters - but almost all of that support has been drawn from those who backed his one-time rivals in the field, and remarkably little from Hillary. (The obvious exception is the mass defection of black voters from Hillary to Obama in February.) In other words, the electorate knows exactly how it feels about the two candidates - and it's split. That's why the Obama campaign was able to make projections all the way at the beginning of February that - although sharply at odds with the polling at the time - were proven remarkably prescient last night.
That's a less exciting narrative than the surges and the improbably comebacks; the gains and the losses; the eroding bases and reassembled coalitions. But it's also more interesting. Each time the traveling circus arrives in a new state, we see a microcosm of this national narrative - the initial numbers, based largely on name-recognition, rapidly shift, until they come into alignment with the state's demographic composition. Then they remain remarkably stubborn. The major variables at play are election-day turnout, crossover voting, and local issues that cut contrary to national trends. And it also allows us to project results forward in time, with a fair degree of accuracy. The upshot is that Obama will likely add around a dozen delegates to his pledged delegate lead before the convention, even if Hillary contests every remaining race. There's margin for error there, but not much - barring a catastrophic scandal, the two rivals will roughly split the remaining pledged delegates.

3) Why is it that reporters continue to tout contests in the largest states as if they will have the greatest impact on the outcome of the race?

Almost every headline I've read, seen, or heard this morning has focused on Pennsylvania, still seven weeks away. But consider that a 60-40% Clinton landslide in that state would yield her (at most) a 32-delegate margin, only about a third of what Clinton needs to close the current gap. Recent polling puts the race closer than that, at somewhere around 55-45%, which would yield (at most) a margin of 17 delegates. In both cases, the outsize clout wielded by heavily-black districts under party rules probably means the margin would be somewhat smaller. And unless Pennsylvania turns out to be dramatically different from the other rust-belt states, Obama will rapidly make up that ground, only to cede some of it back in the final few days (a few polls show that already happening). It wouldn't be the slightest bit surprising if Clinton wins decisively in Pennsylvania, and her pledged delegate gain is somewhere around a dozen. Call it the Ohio scenario, if you will.
Compared to the 158 pledged delegates in the Keystone State, the 33 up for grabs in Mississippi and the 12 in Wyoming do indeed seem like small potatoes. But in 2000, fully 55% of Mississippi primary voters were black. In 2004, that number rose to 56%. Let's be conservative here, and assume that increased interest and higher turnout lower those percentages. We've actually seen an electorate that looks remarkably like the one in Mississippi - in Georgia, where black voters accounted for 51% of those who went to the polls. Obama took that state, 2-1. So I think it's more than reasonable to expect a 22-11 delegate split in Mississippi. Add in an Obama victory in the caucus state of Wyoming (7-5? 8-4?) and suddenly, those two states don't look so small. In fact, the 13-15 delegate margin they're likely to yield is about the same as the optimistic scenarios for Clinton in Pennsylvania.

4) If Clinton's betting her campaign on winning superdelegates to her cause, just how many of them will she have to win over?

By the most transparent count, there are some 284 superdelegates who have yet to publicly announce their endorsements. (That excludes the 76 unpledged add-on delegates, but the best-case Clinton scenario has those delegates evenly split.) Let's assume, for the moment, that the current margin holds - that's actually a remarkably rosy scenario for the Clinton campaign, given the states that have yet to vote, and Obama's built-in advantages in the allocation formulae. The Obama camp claimed 160 more pledged delegates than Hillary going into yesterday's battles - let's whittle that down to 140, in case the Obama camp's "double-digit margin" in the Texas caucuses doesn't actually materialize. Most superdelegate counts give Hillary a margin of 40-45, so we'll knock the total down to 100, because it's a nice, round number. So to grab the nomination, Hillary needs the remaining superdelegates to split somewhat better than 2-1 in her favor.
The trouble is that the current tallies aren't graven in stone. More than a few of Hillary's supporters are under substantial pressure from their own consituencies to reconsider their endorsements; I haven't seen any media accounts of similar pressures being exerted on Obama backers. Hillary also faces an uphill battle in convincing some of her own supporters, and more than a few of the fence-sitters, to vote against the winner of the pledged-delegate tally, a title she no longer even pretends to contest. And, we should mention that Hillary's superdelegate lead has fallen from around 100 to its present total over the past few weeks - the trend is not promising.
So here's a prediction that I'll reiterate: in the next week or so, we're going to see the superdelegates effectively settle this race - ratifying the pledged-delegate results. Next week's elections will see Obama's pledged-delegate lead surge back to 150 or more. With just a few dozen superdelegate endorsements - or fewer, if they include defections - he can entirely erase Hillary's lead in that category. Say he pulls that off - pulling in enough superdelegates to even things out. Hillary would need a virtually impossible margin among the remaining supers to pull out the race. But she faces another problem - the less probable her win, the less likely she is to garner further support. Her current rationale is that the superdelegates will see her as the stronger candidate and come to back her; without a superdelegate lead, that doesn't look too plausible.
We're not going to have to wait for 285 people to make up their minds. A few dozen more decisions will effectively end this thing.

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ObamaCare: American Incrementalism

There's been a great deal of debate this cycle about the relative merits of the candidates' health care plans. The key point seems to be the issue of mandates - Obama would require that all children have health insurance, Hillary would extend that requirement to every American. Whatever the abstract merits of the competing proposals, one thing seems clear - Obama has yet again demonstrated his superior understanding of the American temperament, and that bodes well for the plan advanced by the presumptive nominee.

I would sum it up like this. Hillary may have abandoned the truly-sweeping changes she proposed during her husband's first term, but her plan remains ambitious. It is her aim to enact reforms that would, in one fell swoop, extend coverage to every American (that is, to every citizen and legal resident - she would still exclude millions of those in the country illegally). She and her advisers argue that only truly universal coverage can be economically feasible. Obama is proposing a plan that might, in any other year, seem ambitious - but stacked up against Hillary's seems relatively cautious. He would mandate that every child be covered, but not every adult. If it turns out that the numbers don't add up, he's said, he'll reconsider universal coverage. It's a relatively incremental approach. I'm not qualified to pass judgment on the economic merits of the proposals; smarter folks than I have already written thousands of column-inches on the subject. But I do think that there's another way to gauge the two plans, and that's to consider the visions of change that they embody.

For centuries, Americans have proven resistant to governmental provisions of welfare. The quintessentially American ethos of self-sufficiency and independence leads many voters to recoil from the very notion that the government should take a prominent role in their lives. Many Americans would prefer to shoulder greater risks and maintain their independence, than to surrender their freedom of choice and gain greater security. But there has always been an important exception to this general rule. Americans feel a collective obligation to care for the vulnerable and the defenseless. When proposals are advanced to care for those believed unable to care for themselves, they have almost always enjoyed tremendous support. Moreover, almost every major expansion of the welfare state has followed the same path - reforms initially proposed to benefit the most vulnerable are gradually expanded to benefit all Americans.

Let me offer a few examples. It was in the wake of the Civil War that the federal government first entered the welfare business; an enormous bureaucracy provided benefits for the wounded, and pensions for veterans and their widows and orphans. Governmental regulation of wages and of working hours was first held to be constitutional only insofar as the government acted to protect the vulnerable (women and children), and only much later extended to the workforce as a whole. Modern personal-injury law has its origins in the railroad accidents of the late nineteenth century; the courts initially moved to protect and compensate women, who were seen as dependent and vulnerable, but gradually expanded those protections to men, who were every bit as much at the mercy of machines. Modern product liability and consumer safety protections date to a series of accidents in the mid-1950s, in which poorly designed products led to the maiming or deaths of scores of small children, and were gradually expanded from that narrow base.

In other words, the courts, the legislatures, and the electorate have always been far more supportive of efforts to protect the vulnerable than they have of efforts to expand governmental authority over the able-bodied and the independent. But when those initial efforts have proven effective, they have often cleared the way for more sweeping programs that have followed in their wake.

There's a new NPR Survey out this morning that suggests this holds true for health care, as well. Let me quote Harvard Prof. Robert Blendon, a co-director of the survey:

There was extraordinary support in this poll among all groups — Democrats, Republicans and independents — for the idea of requiring that every child has a
health insurance policy and then provid[ing] help to parents that can't afford
it. And we don't have as wide a consensus for what to do about adults. So it's
the childrens' side of this which offers the possibility of a very quick breakthrough in the next Congress.

That's an important message. Obama has intuited where the American people stand on this issue, for better or for worse. His proposal is consonant with the long history of reform efforts in this nation, which extend help first to the most vulnerable. When the efficacy of those efforts is clear, the rest of the population has often come to support extending the protections. We've already seen this with S-CHIP, which succeeded where HillaryCare failed. It remains immensely popular, and has inexorably expanded in many states to cover increasingly broad segments of the population.

Obama's approach may not please economists, but in some sense, that's immaterial. He can unite the American people in support of his vision, and it's likely to lead to something approaching universal coverage in fairly short order. That ought to cheer critics of the proposal, and even dejected Clinton supports, concerned that her defeat will hamstring efforts at health care reform. If history is any guide, Obama's approach will prove far more politically feasible, and lead us to the same ultimate destination.

Parsing McCain

I'll admit it (even at the price of being flamed in the comments section). When I tuned in to his press conference this morning, I wanted McCain to put this story to rest. Over the past decade, we've had enough scandal, enough personal misconduct, enough betrayal of the public interest to last a lifetime. Though I had my doubts about the sourcing of the story, its broad contours seemed to ring true. And that saddened me. John McCain has done heroic and noble things in his life, and has been a rare advocate for cleaner government on the other side of the aisle. Whatever my substantive disagreements with the man, and they are legion, it seems a shame to see his career founder on this sort of a scandal. I would far rather have the Democratic nominee prevail, as I believe he will, on the basis of the popular support for his policies than popular opprobrium for his rival. For all his flaws, McCain's not Rudy or Romney - I just can't summon the same schadenfreude.

But it didn't take very long for McCain to dig himself a deeper hole. His strategy appeared to be to deny, deny, and deny. In fact, he denied everything. Whatever the premise of his questioner, McCain appeared determined to deny it. Let's go to the transcript:

Q: But you never tried to dissuade [The New York Times]from running the story in any fashion?
SENATOR MCCAIN: No. In fact, I never spoke directly to them.

Except, as McCain himself admitted later on, for his direct call to the Executive Editor. But even then, he said,

I was not trying to dissuade him from -- in any way from doing the story.

Only, if that's true, it's only in the narrowest possible sense. McCain's aides and advisors have spent the last several months trying to dissuade a variety of media outlets from running versions of this story, at his behest. He hired a high-priced lawyer to further those efforts. So why on earth would McCain deny trying to suppress a story he alleges to be scurrilous, when every reporter in the room knows that's exactly what he did? We'll get there.

Up next, the question of what he told the FCC about television station ownership back in 2000. I'll leave debunking this one to Paul Kiel. Another denial that doesn't hold up to scrutiny.

McCain went on to deny, twice, that he had ever discussed with former aide John Weaver a meeting that Weaver had in 1999 with Vicki Iseman. Perhaps they never directly discussed it. But McCain crossed a line when he was asked if Weaver had told him he was talking to the Times, and he said "No." The problem is that Weaver spent the day telling any journalist who would listen that he had been in constant touch with the campaign ("including holidays — Christmas, Thanksgiving, Labor Day — not one day has gone by when I haven't talked to the campaign") and in periodic contact with Senator, and that he e-mailed the three senior staffers on the campaign his statement as he sent it to the Times. And McCain didn't know about it until he read the story? C'mon.

But the real problem with the press conference, and I suspect, the explanation for all the other denials, was his account of his relationship with Vicki Iseman. Let me say this. I suspect that if four reporters for The New York Times are convinced that McCain was engaging in an extra-marital affair, they're probably right. But at the very least, I assume that Iseman enjoyed an unusual degree of intimacy with the senator, something that drew the swirling rumors and innuendo. Perhaps, I thought, we're going to hear a (relatively) benign explanation for that. That the aging senator was flattered by the attentions of the pretty blonde woman. That it was more father-daughter than May-December. Who knows?

The whole point of the press conference, remember, was to definitively dispel the rumors. So when McCain got the question for which he'd been waiting, the one he'd called the press conference in order to field, the exchange went like this:

Q Senator, can you describe your relationship with Vicki Iseman?

SENATOR MCCAIN: Mm-hmm. I -- (we’re ?) friends, seen her on occasions, particularly at receptions and fundraisers and appearances before the committee. I have many friends in Washington who represent various interests and those who don’t. And I consider her a friend.

Q But do you feel like, in terms of your relationship with lobbyists in general, you were closer to her than with others?

SENATOR MCCAIN: No. No, I have many friends who represent various interests ranging, from the firemen to the police to senior citizens to various interests, particularly before my committee, and I had meetings with hundreds of them and various interests....

Whoah. A lobbyist, just like any other? Is he kidding? We're supposed to believe that Vicki Iseman is precisely like, say, Dan Mattoon? That McCain was no closer to her than to any other lobbyist; that they were just friends who bumped into each other around town from time to time?

But wait, there's more. Reporters circled back for a second bite at the apple:

Q Are you still in touch with Ms. Iseman in any way?

SENATOR MCCAIN: With who?

Q With Vicki Iseman. When was the last time you --

SENATOR MCCAIN: I have not, obviously, because I haven’t been in Washington. No, not in some time.

Really, it's too much. This thing's been hovering over his head for two months, threatening to derail his campaign, and he can't recall when he last saw the woman? And the reason he hasn't seen her is that he's been traveling too much, and hasn't spent enough time in DC?

The whole thing stinks to high heaven. As best I can piece this together, we saw McCain's famous temper this morning. His integrity, his honor - the things about which he cares most - were challenged, and by gum, he was going to defend them. No apologies. No (actual) explanations. Everything, everything the Times had written was wrong. Even the things that were right. Perhaps, especially the things that were actually right.

I don't know what happened between McCain and Iseman. It's entirely possible that no one, other than the two of them, actually does. But I do know that McCain's explanation doesn't wash. He can't put this one behind him simply by asserting that he's JOHN MCCAIN, a living embodiment of honor and integrity, and so we all have to trust him. Sooner or later, he's going to have to provide a more complete explanation of what happened between himself and Iseman, who was clearly more to him than just another lobbyist, just another friendly face at cocktail parties and rubber-chicked dinners. Until he gives that explanation - and, if necessary, an apology - this is going to dog him. All his press conference did today was confirm for all who cared to listen that the man is not telling the truth. And for a senator who runs on integrity, I can't think of anything more damaging.

Part Two: The Three Commandments

This is the second half of a two-part post. In the first post, I took stock of the race. This post is my humble attempt to read the tea leaves, and discern where we're headed.

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There's an old truism about presidential candidates: they never give up, they just run out of money. By that measure, we're a long way from the finish line. The Obama campaign has said it's presently pulling in more than $1 million each day, and just revised its January haul up to $36 million. (My own guess is that they'll handily top that amount in February, but that David Plouffe has belatedly realized it's not wise to goad Hillary's supporters into donating ever more to her campaign by trumpeting his daily totals.) The Clinton folks were proud to announce that in the fifteen days since Super Tuesday, they've pulled in $15 million. So both campaigns will be amply funded through March 4, and likely well beyond.

That said, I'll stand by my earlier prognostication. In making the case for her continued viability, Hillary wrote off the contests in February, and placed her chips on the March 4 contests. There's a general consensus in the party that she ought to have a fair crack at those elections, a final chance to prove that she can turn the race around. When the results from the four March 4 states are tallied and the delegate hauls projected, it won't take CNN's nifty touch-screen or any complicated math to explain to voters where the race stands. Shortly thereafter, we'll see the superdelegates begin to close ranks around Obama, in an effort to build consensus and shift the focus to the general election.

So the question that concerns me this morning is this: What sort of a campaign will unfold over the next two weeks, as Hillary prepares to make her final stand? We already have some inkling that the answer will be, "Increasingly ugly."

There are, if you will, three commandments that ought to be equally binding on both candidates as the race enters its final phase.

Thou Shalt Not Slander:

It's already apparent that this race is taking a dive into increasingly negative territory. Clinton's advisers couldn't wait to tell reporters that she'll adopt "a tougher line" in an effort to redefine her rival. Obama, meanwhile, intends to harp on Clinton's support for free trade. That's fine, even healthy. I happen to believe that this vigorous contest for the nomination has proven, well, invigorating for the Democratic Party. Voters are listening to the candidates debate the issues, donating and volunteering in record-shattering numbers, and turning out to vote at rates rarely seen. The more the candidates engage with each other, the more their supporters engage with the process.

But that's only true to the extent that the contrasts being drawn are truthful. When a candidate stoops to distorting a rival's record, it harms the attacker's credibility, the victim's approval ratings, and the party's chances in November. We've seen some of this already. Obama is way out of line when his mailers claim that Hillary thought NAFTA had provided a "boon," placing quotes around the word. The Clintons were wrong to suggest that Obama was a Reagan fan, much less that he supported his policies. And we're going to see more of it, simply because these attacks tend to work. No correction ever erases the damage done by the initial claim. This primary race ought to be won on the merits. Both candidates have the chance to draw fair, meaningful contrasts based solely on the public record. Let's hope they do.

Thou Shalt Not Challenge the Legitimacy of the Process:

When the party chooses its nominee, it is vital that all Americans believe that the process used to select the candidate was fair and transparent. As I've noted, there are abundant flaws with the process. The important thing, for this cycle, is that we recognize that it's the only process that we've got. It's well worth revising for future cycles, but challenging the rules half-way through the game is corrosive.

The Obama campaign isn't blameless here. Various campaign advisers have suggested that the superdelegates ought to follow the expressed will of voters in their districts, their states, or the nation. There's a fine line between making a case to superdelegates that they ought to vote for Obama, and suggesting that a failure to vote for the man constitutes a perversion of the process, and the campaign has occasionally strayed across it.

That said, there's simply no question that the prime offender here is the Clinton campaign. The candidate herself has challenged the legitimacy of the caucus results. Of the scheduling rules and related penalties approved by the DNC. Of Obama's victories in states with large black populations, or in those which routinely vote for Republicans. Her surrogates and supporters are now suggesting that we might attempt to discern the will of only those voters who self-identify as Democrats. This is pernicious, it's destructive, and it's wrong. It also happens to be petty, and I suspect that, far from sustaining the rational for her candidacy, it has undermined her credibility with large segments of the electorate.

We started this primary process with a badly-flawed set of rules, but that's how it is. Both candidates need to refrain from challenging the rules; the most these attacks can accomplish is tainting the victory of the eventual nominee.

Thou Shalt Not Use Race or Gender as a Wedge:

Black voters (who overwhelmingly support Democrats) and women (who trend more modestly Democratic, but compose more than half of all voters) are the twin pillars on which the party is built. Alienate either constituency, and the prospects for a win in November grow decidedly gloomy.

In an ideal world, both candidates would make their appeal to the voters by transcending identity politics. But we don't live in that world. Obama's dominance among black voters is a political phenomenon, virtually without precedent, and it presents a terrible temptation to the Clinton campaign. Without hope or prospect of making inroads among African Americans, there's very little to restrain the Clintons from exploiting the racial divide that afflicts our nation, other than their own moral judgment. The dynamics, as it happens, work differently with gender. Obama needs to tread very carefully around the issue, as he woos women to the polls, but he enjoys a healthy lead among male voters that has propelled him to many of his victories. Here, it's more of a positive commandment than a negative injunction - Obama must do more than he already has to reach out to women voters, particularly those left feeling embittered by Hillary's loss, and convince them that he can be as effective an advocate for the issues they care about as she has been.

I suspect that, after South Carolina, the Clinton campaign resolved not to raise the issue of race explicitly. But there's no question that it's still being deployed with regularity on the ground level, particularly in states with substantial Hispanic populations. The key example is Texas, where the Clinton campaign has been decrying the primary system as stacked against Hispanic voters in favor of large, urban districts - a construction of the issue that suggests black and brown voters are in a zero-sum game, and that Hispanics are losing their fair share of the delegates to African Americans. That's a particularly shameful argument to make, in that it violates both the second and third of our commandments.

Without temptation, commandments would be unnecessary. But both candidates need to resist temptation: Obama, the temptation to take women for granted, and Clinton, the temptation to write off black voters and (however subtly) exploit racial divisions. Let's hope they're equal to the challenge.

Arbiters of the Rules:

We needn't rely on goodwill or luck to enforce these three commandments. Both candidates, for the moment, are beholden to the Democratic establishment for support. Without superdelegates, neither can realistically win the nomination. We've already seen efforts among the uncommitted superdelegates to agree upon a common metric for determining the winner. I'd like to see those efforts expanded to include some clear ground rules about how the contest ought to be waged.

And then there's the invisible man - DNC Chair Howard Dean. The candidates are supposed to be focused on winning the nomination; Dean is supposed to have the interests of the party at heart. He should be taking forceful action to ensure that the candidates behave, and that their campaigns are making the party stronger, and not tearing it apart. There's a chance here to keep this primary relatively clean, and to make it the most remarkable and effective organizing tool we've ever seen. Let's not blow it.

If you've enjoyed this, please share it with other readers by clicking the 'recommend this' link. You can find more analysis, including the first part of this post, on my blog. As always, I welcome comments and corrections. And thanks to all who have responded.