Of all the ways to describe Tuesday night as a bad night for Hillary Clinton, perhaps the most dramatic is to point out this: the pundits on CNN and MSNBC started comparing her to Rudy Giuliani.
Giuliani, of course, has become a national punch line for his decision to skip the first four Republican contests and put all his chips on Florida, where he lost humiliatingly because … he skipped the first four Republican contests.
Clinton is not in that bad a position, and fans of Barack Obama who are tempted to think so need to refrain from gloating — on Wednesday Clinton was still way ahead in Ohio, and a Giuliani-like collapse either there or in Texas seems unlikely.
But the tea leaves of Obama’s dominating, 20-plus-percentage point win in Virginia — the seat of the old Confederacy, it still bears mentioning — contain bleak auguries for the erstwhile inevitable candidate.
A few striking numbers — some of them stunning numbers — from the Virginia exit polls. Obama carried white men with 55%. He carried Latinos with 55%. He carried Catholics with 52%. He carried voters with incomes less than $50 000 with 59%. He carried independents with 62% — and far more independents voted in the Democratic primary, for Obama, than in the GOP primary, for McCain. And he carried Republicans who chose to vote in the Democratic primary (they constituted 7% of the vote) with 70%.
And, lest the Clinton campaign try to say that Obama’s win was the result of his popularity among said independents and Republicans? Obama carried Democrats with 59%.
Clinton held on to win whites overall, but by a whisker: 51% to 48%.
These numbers constitute arguments — arguments that Obama can carry into Wisconsin’s primary next Tuesday and beyond. Suddenly, he can say that he’s got juice with Latino voters, that he can win white votes in large numbers and that he can win among middle- to lower-income voters. Additionally, there’s just the question of winning.
Virginia and Maryland are large or at least large-ish states with primaries, not caucuses (some Clinton partisans have tried to devalue Obama’s string of caucus wins on the basis that they draw a more elitist voter). They are important in November, especially Virginia, where Democrats smell the possibility of general-election victory for the first time since the distant Civil Rights era (the last Democrat to carry Virginia was Lyndon Johnson in 1964). They are what we might call ”evidence states”: states in which a candidate can use the primary to amass evidence that he or she can go the distance in November.
Which brings us back to Clinton’s strategy with regard to these states. Her campaign was forced to make the decision not to compete hard in there in late January, when she was out of money and had to choose to save her resources for Texas and Ohio. Everyone understands that.
But the fact is, you can’t say, ”Well, we never expected to win there,” and hope the results somehow won’t count. A Democrat can get away with that with regard to some of the smaller caucus states Obama won on Super Tuesday: Idaho, Utah and so forth. But you can’t say it about states like Virginia and Maryland.
On the Republican side, things were as grey as they were black-and-white on the Democratic side. John McCain was projected the Virginia winner, but it took more than 90 minutes after the polls closed. Conservatives are still not voting for him.
This keeps McCain’s fundamental problem very much alive. As long as so imperfect a vessel as Mike Huckabee can hold McCain’s conservative vote down and make him struggle to win a state like Virginia (and the hints they’re dropping on cable TV suggest that Maryland might be fairly close too), it keeps the anti-McCain talk-radio faction abubble with anti-McCain invective.
But McCain will, eventually, win the GOP nomination. So the greater drama is still on the Democratic side. Despite Obama’s huge night, the nomination remains a very open question. Three weeks from tonight, we may all be writing that her decision to skip almost the whole month of February and focus on Texas and Ohio paid off. And there is Wisconsin in the meantime, where she now has the money to compete if she chooses to.
But all these losses in a row have to start emanating a certain odour to voters. The story of tonight in a sentence? Actually, it’s better in two sentences: Obama and Clinton have been fighting to draw based on their appeals to different and discrete segments of the Democratic vote. After Virginia, Obama is eating into her segments, and as of now this race is no longer a draw.
It’s a long way from a blowout, but it’s no longer a draw. — Â