The maths is still the maths. But after Hillary Clinton’s substantial win over Barack Obama in Pennsylvania, the maths is now competing with the mo — that is, momentum.
Even after Tuesday’s 10-point defeat, Obama still appears all but certain to finish the primary season with more popular votes and more pledged delegates than Clinton. Nine contests now remain. If one had to make predictions today, one would guess that Obama should win five of them, while Clinton would take three, with one, Indiana, in the toss-up category.
In delegate terms, North Carolina, where Obama leads, is by far the largest (134), with Indiana second (84). Oregon, Kentucky and Puerto Rico are all bunched in the 60s. The rest are smaller. Delegates, of course, are awarded proportionally, so neither candidate will overwhelm the other numerically.
Even without a spreadsheet or an abacus, you can see from the above that the maths still supports Obama being the nominee. The final voting, in South Dakota and Montana, takes place on June 3. If on the morning of June 4 Obama is ahead by even 40 or 50 pledged delegates, I don’t think the Clintons (and it’s not just her, it is the Clintons, and I mean all three of them!) can strong-arm the superdelegates into undoing that verdict.
That would amount to overturning something we call over here “the will of the people”, a phrase that has few equals with regard to its talismanic properties in American political culture.
OK, so that’s that. However, how can Obama keep losing key contests and still fairly expect Democrats, from rank-and-filers to insider heavyweights, not to be given pause? He’s had four opportunities now to end this race with one win and hasn’t been able to do it. And as rough as he’s had it these past two weeks, some of it his own fault and a lot of it not, the fact is that he should have done better in Pennsylvania, given the resources he poured into the state. If he’d held Clinton to a six-point win, I’d be writing a very different column.
But he didn’t, and Clinton’s win, while pulling up just short of being a game-changing blowout, was enough to give her momentum heading into the next major contests. Which just happen to be … the two largest remaining states, North Carolina and Indiana, which vote on May 6.
There are three possible outcomes, so let’s just run through them:
• Obama wins both: the contest is over. An Obama sweep will give Democrats just the excuse they need to end this long, collective, increasingly unendurable trip to the dentist.
• Clinton wins both: this would really change things. A North Carolina win in particular would constitute an Obama collapse (he leads by 10 to 15 points there now), and he’d start to resemble a thoroughbred who set a blistering pace on the back stretch but ran out of gas at the clubhouse turn.
• They split, the far more likely scenario being that Obama takes North Carolina while Clinton snags Indiana: the spin will depend to some extent on the victory margins, but in essence, status quo. The mess continues.
A split still probably favours the person who’s ahead, Obama. But the real problem is the beating he will continue to take from the Clintons and the media, and how that beating is altering his reputation and making him a weaker candidate against John McCain than the Obama of 10 or 12 weeks ago would have been. You don’t hear many people using words like “Kennedyesque” anymore.
What will be will be. But let’s end this with a piece of Democratic good news. The turnout in Pennsylvania on Tuesday was 2,3-million voters. That’s just a jaw-dropping figure. It’s more than three times the number of people who have tended to vote in recent presidential primaries.
Admittedly those weren’t competitive races and this one was. But 2,3-million is still really high. If Democrats can unify around either of these candidates, a turnout like this suggests a strong Democratic advantage in November — presuming they don’t gobble themselves up first. — Â