Clinton Needs to Secure 'Overwhelming' Primary Wins (Update1)
By Hans Nichols and Catherine Dodge
Feb. 28 (Bloomberg) -- Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton may be unable to match Barack Obama in the party's delegate race even if she pulls off wins in the Texas and Ohio primaries next week.
While the math says she can still catch him, the odds are daunting because the Democratic Party doesn't have winner-take- all contests. Clinton instead may need to rely on chemistry, a chain-reaction set off by big wins in the March 4 races and in Pennsylvania in April that will persuade wavering delegates that she's the stronger candidate to face the Republican nominee in November.
``Because of proportional representation, if one candidate gets a significant lead of pledged delegates, it's difficult -- but not impossible -- for the trailing candidate to make up the delegate disadvantage,'' said Tad Devine, a strategist for Democratic Senator John Kerry's 2004 presidential bid. It would take ``overwhelming'' victories in the remaining primaries. ``You really need to beat someone by 20 percentage points.''
Obama is ahead of Clinton by as many as 156 pledged delegates, who will vote on the nomination at the Democratic convention in August, according to an unofficial count by NBC News. There are 370 delegates at stake on March 4, and party rules for how they are awarded make it unlikely Clinton will cut much, if at all, into his lead.
Superdelegates
Clinton, a senator from New York, continues to have an edge among superdelegates, Democratic officeholders and party officials who aren't bound by primary and caucus votes, according to a tally by The Green Papers, a nonpartisan Web site. Still, Obama, an Illinois senator, has momentum on his side, gaining backing from superdelegates such as Connecticut Senator Christopher Dodd, who dropped his own presidential bid in January, and Senator Byron Dorgan of North Dakota.
Next week's contests, which include Rhode Island and Vermont, illustrate Clinton's challenge. A narrow victory by her in Ohio will lead to an almost equal distribution of the state's 141 delegates. In Texas, with 193 pledged delegates available, the arithmetic for Clinton is worse.
State party rules will ``create some interesting distortions,'' said Jack Martin, a Texas Democratic strategist.
Clinton, 60, could win statewide in Texas and still collect fewer delegates than Obama because 126 of them are awarded by state senate districts, and those won by Democrats in the last two elections get more delegates.
District Math
The most delegate-rich districts -- those with five to eight delegates each -- are in Houston, Dallas and Austin, many with concentrations of black voters. That will be Obama territory. Most of Clinton's strongholds are among the heavily Hispanic districts along the Texas-Mexico border areas, most with no more than four delegates.
Even losing the ``South Texas vote by as much as a 2-to-1 margin, Obama could be down as few as two delegates'' statewide, Martin said.
The remaining 67 pledged Texas delegates are awarded in caucuses convened after polls close for the primary. Obama, 46, has beaten Clinton in all but two of the caucuses held so far. In one of those losses, Nevada, Obama still managed to gain one more delegate than Clinton.
Early voting has already started in both Ohio and Texas.
After March 4, with about a fifth of the pledged delegates still available, Obama may have the upper hand.
A private Obama delegate projection shows Clinton's challenge even with victories next week. The calculations are conservative. For example, they showed Obama losing Maine on Feb. 10 and he ended up winning there.
Obama's Projections
The Obama campaign's projection assumes Clinton will win Pennsylvania, West Virginia, Kentucky and Puerto Rico. It shows Obama winning more states, including Wyoming, Mississippi, North Carolina, Indiana, Oregon, Montana and South Dakota.
Under that scenario, he would get slightly more delegates than Clinton, letting him build his lead in pledged convention votes and giving him an opportunity to win over more of the 795 superdelegates, only about half of whom have publicly taken sides. Still, it shows neither candidate with the 2,025 total delegates needed to win the nomination.
Democratic political strategists not associated with either campaign, independent experts and even some Clinton supporters concur in that outlook.
``I don't think superdelegates are going to go against the flow,'' said Stephen Wayne, a professor of government at Georgetown University in Washington. ``Politicians hate to get on the wrong bandwagon.''
Momentum
Again, Obama has the momentum. In the 11 contests he has won since Super Tuesday on Feb. 5, he has pocketed 65 percent of the pledged delegates, according to William Galston, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution in Washington.
Clinton will need to match that yield to pull even.
``It's difficult to imagine that Clinton can win'' in the March 4 states ``with sufficiently large margins to appreciably close her delegate deficit with Obama,'' said Charlie Cook, an independent political analyst in Washington. ``She'd have to win with landslide margins.''
``The powers that be in the Democratic Party'' won't call on Clinton to leave the race before March 4, said Cook. Starting on March 5, ``you will hear a chorus calling for her to drop out.''
Last Updated: February 28, 2008 08:43 EST |
