Super Tuesday Postgame Analysis

Democratic Headline: Obama levels the playing field

Let’s start by saying that when the delegate counting today is complete, Obama will have won more delegates on Super Tuesday than Clinton. The difference will be small, but make no mistake - Obama has cleared a major barrier to his candidacy.

Don’t tell this to Rudy Guiliani, but front-loading the primary schedule was a huge advantage for the frontrunner. Hillary Clinton has held a 20-30% lead in most of the Super Tuesday states for the last few months. Obama has had to pare down these huge margins in a very short amount of time. The odds were long against Obama still having a viable candidacy exiting Super Tuesday. Last week I predicted he’d lose by 70 delegates, and I thought he’d be lucky to get that. But thanks to some brilliant tactics and campaigning we now have a horserace. Furthermore, the back half of this race favors neither. The best campaign will win.

So, what were the strategies going into Super Tuesday?

Clinton:
1. Clean up in NY and CA
2. Win her “backyard” states: MA, CT, NJ
3. Win Western states with large Hispanic populations: AZ, NM
4. Win in her other “home” state and backyard AK, MO, OK, TN
5. Concede the caucus states?

Obama:
1. Clean up in IL and heavily black AL, and GA
2. Minimize the damage in NY and CA
3. Try to pick off a couple of Hillary’s backyard states where it was close: CT, NJ (Concede MA), MO
4. Clean up in caucus states

Evaluating the execution, I’d say both sides did well. Hillary cleaned up in NY, the jury is still out, but she should get something like a 10% delegate margin in CA … a solid victory, but not the bonanza she was hoping for. Obama was able to win narrow victories in a couple of Hillary’s backyard states: MO and CT. But that was somewhat offset by extra delegates in MA and a convincing win in NJ (which had been running neck-and-neck in all the polling). AZ and NM were split, but NM was a caucus state and was won by a very narrow margin.

On the Obama side, he did extremely well in his cleanup states winning many extra delegates. Results in the head to head competitions were mixed as I described above. But most impressive was that he was able to run the table in the caucus states. I’m thinking that the Clinton team has to be pretty surprised at the magnitude of the victories there:

State Clinton Obama
Idaho 17% 80%
Kansas 26% 74%
Alaska 25% 74%
Colorado 32% 67%
Minnesota 32% 67%
North Dakota 37% 61%

These are some lily white states we’re talking about. Prior to Super Tuesday, Obama hadn’t proved he could get more than 40% of the white vote. I think team Clinton was counting on the race gap to keep Obama from blowing her out here. One problem with that strategy though … these are typically low turnout affairs. So a good “get out the vote” ground game produced some eyebrow raising results.

The bottom line on all of this is that even though both sides will be claiming victory today, the Obama camp has to be pretty happy to be where they are. And the Clinton camp has to feel like they missed the opportunity to take control of this race.

But exiting Super Tuesday both sides probably feel pretty good about their chances going forward.


GOP Headline: McCain takes Command, but Reagan coalition fractures

On the Republican side McCain swept the big winner-take-all NE states: NY, NJ, CT. He also won convincingly in IL and OK and eked out MO. On this basis, he takes something like a 250 delegate lead and is the prohibitive favorite.

The story of the night was Huckabee’s over-achievement. He was expected to be competitive in states with a heavy evangelical population. But he was able to win 6 states outright: AL, AK (where he was governor), WV, GA, IA and TN. In GA, AL, an WV the margins were slim. My guess is that the conservative campaigns that were intended to drive votes from McCain to Romney unintentionally diverted votes to Huckabee. Thus McCain’s margin of victory was not as strong as it might have been, but the race is still 3 horses which ultimately hurts Romney. Had Huckabee only won 2 states, he might have been convinced to step aside.

So while Romney otherwise did well, he now faces very long odds. His campaign is relying heavily on his personal fortune and the return on investment doesn’t look good. This is purely speculation, but I’m guessing Romney will withdraw in the very near term.

As of today, McCain is in the driver’s seat. He’s got a coalition of moderates and hawks that will make him competitive going forward and his competition is running out of steam. It’s hard to think of a scenario by which McCain might lose, but if there is one, it starts with Huckabee or Romney dropping out of the race quickly.

The bad news in all of this is that with Huckabee’s success, the Republican coalition is now split 3 ways: moderates and hawks going with McCain, fiscal/traditional conservatives going with Romney, and evangelicals going with Huckabee. McCain has to bring the coalition together again. The quicker he can put this race away, the sooner he can start doing that.


PS: Here's some good links to watch today as the delegate counts unfold. I wouldn't pay too much attention to the superdelegate counts until we get closer to the convention.

http://www.cnn.com/ELECTION/2008/primaries/results/scorecard/#val=D
http://www.cnn.com/ELECTION/2008/primaries/results/scorecard/#val=R