Some notes on the Presidential Race
1.Hillary is over and has been for at least a month. It is impossible for her to close the delegate gap. So, to win, super-delegates would have to decide to support her in one of two ways. They might, first, simply hand her the nomination against the will of the majority of the delegates. Or, second, they could change the rules in a way that gives Hillary the majority of regular delegates by, say, seating overwhelmingly pro-Clinton delegations from Michigan and Florida. The first path is manifestly undemocratic. The super-delegates might get away with this without too much complaint from the Obama supporters and the broader public if there were broad agreement that Obama is somehow too flawed to be President or far less likely to defeat McCain than Clinton. But, in the absence of an utterly unforeseeable event, that is just not going to happen. Whatever you think of who is more electable, the case for Clinton or Obama is simply not obvious.
The other alternative is for the Clinton delegates and super-delegate to change the rules. But that would be so manifestly unfair that it would damage a Clinton campaign and not just with the Black supporters of Obama who would, rightly in my view, believe that racism, or oversensitivity to racism among the electorate, is responsible for Obama losing the nomination. Clinton is ambitious, possibly to the extent of endorsing such a suicidal move. The super-delegates will not go along.
2.The struggle between Clinton and Obama will not hurt the Democratic nominee in the general election. The political science evidence against the likelihood of contested primaries hurting general election nominees is pretty overwhelming, unless something comes out in a contested primary that damages a candidate that would not come out in the general. In most cases, however, the earlier damaging information about a candidate comes out, the better. Jeremiah Wright will be, for many people, old news by October.
The reason we political activists fear contested primaries is that we are intensely involved in them and tend to strongly favor one side or another. And that tends to make us angry at the other side. Most voters are not like us. Sure, they will take sides and for a day or two, and in the run-up to voting, will disparage the candidate not their own. But most people pay little attention to the presidential primary when it is not in their state. And their anger about the election tends to dissipate. Moreover, once the focus is not on Obama vs Clinton, but Obama vs McCain, then voters will tend to forget about primary squabbles. (It has recently become a truism of political science that the opinion of voters on both issues and candidates is highly volatile and changes depending on the choices offered them.) So I guarantee that if you ask Obama and Clinton voters from Pennsylvania if they will not vote for the other candidate in three weeks, you will see results far more encouraging than those found in the exit polls on April 22.
Of course, we activists will remain angry for a lot longer. But we are in the forefront of those who want to see a Democrat elected in 2008. The Clinton supporters among us are not going to abandon Obama. (And don’t tell me about 1968…the evidence that McCarthy and Kennedy activists did not vote for Humphrey is, as far as I know, entirely anecdotal. And if it did happen, it was more because Humphrey waffled on the war, not because McCarthy and Kennedy supporters hated Humphrey. We didn’t. We felt sorry for Hubert.)
3.Racism is not going to hurt Obama much if at all. Yes, he is going to lose the votes of some white working class Democrats who can’t bring themselves to vote for a black candidate. But many of those working class Democrats have been voting Republican for years because of quasi-racial and lifestyles appeals on such issues as busing, affirmative action, Willie Horton, and gay rights. Democrats have not been winning an overwhelming majority of the white working class for a long time.
Remember, in the fall voters will choose not between Obama and Clinton but between Obama and a Republican who can be tied to a Republican President presiding over a recession. Under these conditions, a brilliant, non-threatening black candidate, who will be running a centrist campaign, is not going to be more objectionable than the white candidates who have been tarred with these Republican wedge issues and who ran in better economic times.
And, finally, for every white voter Obama loses, he may bring another black voter to the polls. So not only does Obama have a good chance of winning the states with large working class urban centers, he has a chance to pick up some states in the South. The appropriate historical parallel is the Kennedy race in 1960. Jack Kennedy did less well with Protestant voters than Truman and Stevenson. But he did much better with Catholics and brought many more Catholics to the polls. (Catholics voted less frequently then than they do know because they were less well integrated into the middle class in 1960 then they are today. The best research on the 1960 election showed that Kennedy gained 2.2% over the expected Democratic vote because of his religion. The race was close not because of his religion but because times were pretty good, Nixon was the relatively popular Vice President of a very popular President, and JFK was young. Obama’s youth is a concern today although my sense is that this is not likely to be as important now as it was in 1960.
4. If we don’t screw up royally, we are going to win this one (Just don’t get overconfident). It is possible to make fairly accurate predictions of Presidential election results by looking at the state of the economy and the popularity of the incumbent President in the spring of the election year. Take a look at the numbers now and you will see that this election is ours to lose.