How political analysts can get it wrong.
On South Carolina and Self-Image
By Matt Bai
Almost two years ago now, I interviewed Joe Trippi, the Democratic strategist, at a Starbucks in Northwest Washington. At that time, Mr. Trippi hadn’t signed on with any of the campaigns, and he laid out a case for why Hillary Clinton couldn’t be beaten in the primaries. The reason was simple: black voters.
Let’s just say, Mr. Trippi argued, that you could beat her in Iowa or even in New Hampshire, or come close enough so that her candidacy no longer seemed a sure thing. Well, Mr. Trippi said, then you’d go to the South, and in a Democratic primary there, black voters account for 40, even 50 percent of the electorate. African Americans don’t just like the Clintons, he said—they adore them. And that was the real firewall, Mr. Trippi said. If you could get just a third of that black vote, then you could change the entire equation, but barring that, Senator Clinton was going to sweep the South and probably some big industrial states, too.
At the time, Mr. Trippi thought the only candidate who might be able to breach that firewall was Al Gore. I don’t recall us talking much about Barack Obama. I think we assumed he wouldn’t run.
I’ve been thinking about that conversation ever since I left South Carolina this weekend. Heading into Feb. 5, Mr. Trippi’s theory about the importance of black voters has been borne out, but the result has been turned on its head. Not only did Senator Obama eat into the Clintons’ reliable foundation of black voters, but, as perhaps only a credible African American could have done, he stole it outright. He also managed to play her to a virtual draw among white men. All of which added up to a major victory and a formula that, if it plays out in other Southern states, will make it very difficult for Mrs. Clinton to pile up the delegates she needs to end the contest on Feb. 5.
Now, if you’re looking at all this from a purely crass and mathematical point of view, then the challenges facing both candidates over the next week are pretty straightforward. Mrs. Clinton now finds herself relying primarily on her margin among white women, which is a precarious place to be, while Mr. Obama has a serious problem among Latinos, which could cost him some major states. Both campaigns will spend the next eight days slicing up the primary electorate in targeted ads and mailings. It’s a political scientist’s dream, the kind of thing from which countless masters theses are derived.
But politics really isn’t, at its core, a crass, mathematical endeavor; it is a human pursuit, populated by people with the same very human ambitions and insecurities that plague the rest of us. And so I find myself wondering not about which candidate might win or lose votes, but about how strange this must feel for both of them, now that their own self-images, the rationales that got them into politics to begin with, have been completely upended.
After all, Mr. Obama has always seen himself, near as we can tell, as a man who transcends ordinary conventions about race, who isn’t really a “black politician.” And yet here he is being compared to Jesse Jackson and depending heavily on his connection with black voters to forge the kind of coalition he needs. Now race is his firewall, not Mrs. Clinton’s — the main thing that makes him, at this late date, such a formidable insurgent. One can imagine that it’s not easy for Mr. Obama to get his head around that.
The post-South Carolina reality has to be even more disconcerting, though, for Senator Clinton. This is a woman, don’t forget, who came into politics during the civil rights era and who has, at every opportunity in her public life, dedicated herself, along with her husband, to the idea of racial equality. And now she wakes up to find—in fact, she probably understood it weeks ago, when she decided to go hard at Mr. Obama—that not only have those black voters deserted her, but that her campaign now hinges, to a large extent, on racial polarization. This is unpleasant but undeniable: the more white and Latino voters perceive Mr. Obama to be the candidate of black America, the more likely Mrs. Clinton is to win. Strategically, the Clintons have adapted to this reality. Personally, however, it is a direct contradiction to everything they have tried to embody for decades, and it has to hurt.
As for Mr. Trippi, he went on, of course, to become the chief strategist for John Edwards, who barely registered among black voters in the exit polls from Saturday’s primary and lost by a lot. Mr. Trippi was right, in the end, about how crucial to the nomination fight the African American vote would be. He just couldn’t have foreseen that Hillary Rodham Clinton wouldn’t be the beneficiary, after all.
Matt Bai, who covers politics for the Sunday Times Magazine, is the author of “The Argument: Billionaires, Bloggers and the Battle to Remake Democratic Politics.”
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