Are you ready for some football? No, not the Superbowl …

We’re talking political football here. Let’s take it back to our studios for some analysis.

Dem side:

Obama ran up the score on Hillary last week in South Carolina (Obama 55.4%, Clinton 26.5%, Edwards 17.6%). However, the lopsided victory wasn’t all that it seemed. South Carolina has a much higher percentage of African American’s than most other states. In this primary African Americans not only voted for Obama over Hillary 80% to 20%, they also showed up in force … up 75% from 2004. In SC, African Americans were 55% of the vote. While nationwide in the Democratic primaries, the number will be more like 20%. Among South Carolina’s white voters, Obama came in third (Edwards 40%, Clinton 36%, Obama 24%).

But let’s look at this a little deeper … what if African American voters only represented 20% of the vote in South Carolina? Obama still would have won, but with a much smaller margin. The results would have looked like this: Obama 34.6%, Clinton 32.6%, Edwards 32.4. Reading a little more into this, Edwards would have been about 22 points over his national average (national polls: Clinton 42%, Obama 32%, Edwards 10%). Reading the tea leaves, a sizeable chunk (~8%) of Hillary voters went to Edwards (who probably benefited from a regional advantage) and a smaller chunk (~2%) went to Obama.

So the bottom line here is that it looks like there was a pretty major negative movement among Hillary voters. It’s hard to say whether this will play out in the Super Tuesday votes. However there’s reason to believe that we will see at least some of this shift on Feb 5. The Clintons were seen as running a divisive campaign in SC. Some high profile democrats voiced concerns about possible long term damage to the party.

For the moment, let's assume that the current polling (nationally a 10% lead for Clinton over Obama) holds. My back of the envelope calculations show that Clinton picks up about 640 delegates to 590 for Obama on Super Tuesday (not counting non-pledged)). Edwards will get about 150 and the remaining 20% or so will be uncommitted. Getting back to my football theme, Hillary is up by 2 touchdowns at halftime. Obama's best chance is to get to a brokered convention and have the general election look iffy if Hillary is the candidate. In that case, Obama want's to keep Edwards in the race to keep Hillary from reaching the 2025 delegates necessary to get a first ballot win at the Democratic Convention.

If however we get a 5% closure of the gap between Clinton and Obama, it's a one TD lead at halftime ... still a ballgame. Obama should be less worried about Clinton reaching 2025 and if he believes he’ll get most of the Edwards voters, he should cut a deal with Edwards and get him out of the race.

It’s theoretically possible that a combination of a shift away from Hillary and great turnout among young people and African Americans can close the gap entirely. However, the chances of that happening are unlikely. Young people are notoriously unreliable voters.



GOP side:

On the Republican side we also have a 2 horse race between McCain and Romney. Huckabee is flaming out and Guiliani never got out of the gate. The winner-take-all states … FL, NJ, and NY could quickly turn this into a McCain runaway. McCain has a small lead in FL (75 delegates) and NJ (39 delegates) and a big lead in NY (87 delegates). If McCain runs the table in these three states he could be up 3 TDs going into the halftime. Romney needs to win FL to stay within a TD. If he can somehow win both FL AND NJ, he can go in to halftime with the field goal lead.


Predictions:

I’m predicting that Obama cuts the gap in half and thus Hillary gains a 75 (pledged) delegate advantage exiting Super Tuesday.

On the Republican side, I’m predicting a McCain sweep of the WTA states and thus a 200 delegate lead exiting Super Tuesday.

We’ll see you back at halftime for highlights!


By the way, here's a pretty good site for poll data:
http://www.electoral-vote.com/evp2008/Data/Polls.html