How big of a difference did obama's crushing of hillary in SC make?

i voted for the 26-40, but am on the high side and can understand the low side of the next step up.

The bottom line for me is this.

If Obama won by single digits tonight, I thought his chances were very slim(10% maybe).

If Obama won by double digits tonight, I thought it might be 25%.

Since Obama won by 28%, and doubled Hillary. I have no idea what to think.

total guesstimates:
~ 42% I think.
Hillary is ~53%

and the left over 1/20 I would attribute to "other": Edwards or someone else (i.e. Gore) picking it up on the floor of a brokered convention.

In any case, I think two things are pretty clear:
1) Hill is still unfortunately the fav to pick up the nomination
2) It's far from over.

I think it is very likely that they will be within 5-10% delegate wise of each other post Super Tuesday...Obama needs to root for Edwards on Super Tuesday...the more delegates he picks up the more it hurts Hillary.

If they are nearly tied going past Super Tuesday I think its advantage Obama since he is the more likable candidate and he is the change candidate. The notion of a "what are the odds he actually can win" etc etc will be out the window.

from MSNBC



Obama is becoming the "black" candidate (in terms of which voters vote for him). there aren't enough blacks outside the deep south to give him enough victories or delegates, and look how poorly he did amoung whites.

http://blogs.abcnews.com/politicalpu...-obama-is.html


Bubba: Obama Is Just Like Jesse Jackson

January 26, 2008 8:18 PM
Said Bill Clinton today in Columbia, SC: "Jesse Jackson won South Carolina in '84 and '88. Jackson ran a good campaign. And Obama ran a good campaign here."
This was in response to a question about Obama saying it "took two people to beat him." Jackson had not been mentioned.
Boy, I can't understand why anyone would think the Clintons are running a race-baiting campaign to paint Obama as "the black candidate."
-- jpt


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qqd2dfjl2pw

It would be interesting to see how Edwards' 40% would be split between Clinton and Obama if he wasn't in the race.

Obama got 52% of the non-black vote among people under 30. He did poorly among whites because he did poorly among older white voters in the deep South, not because he doesn't appeal to whites. He did ok in lily white Iowa, and won more delegates than Clinton in lily white New Hampshire.

Obama has always been the "black" candidate in the South where race is a larger factor. We can expect him to do better among blacks and worse among whites there, compared with other states in the North, East, or West.

http://quickfacts.census.gov/qfd/states/19000.html

I hate media narratives.

None of these primaries to date are representative. Much more to be revealed in nine days.

If there is any trend that has developed, it's that an astounding number of voters who customarily identify with one party or another are taking their sweet time making up their minds -- weak support is making polling difficult, but not as inaccurate as some people would like to believe. The numbers for Obama in New Hampshire, and all the Republicans, were accurate, for example. It was just Hillary's numbers that were off -- women were energized late, in part because of a charge the Clinton campaign made misrepresenting Obama's pro-choice position. This made a lot more noise among Democratic regulars in New Hampshire than was reported by the national media.

(Forgive me if this is terribly old news; first trip here...)

Obama got 1/4 of the white vote in a three-way race. That's hardly disasterous. More importantly, South Carolina's politics has been racially polarized for a long time.

When the campaign moves to less polarized states, you'll see Obama get white votes similar to what he got in Iowa and New Hampshire.

More specifically all that first quoted poster did was just regurgitate Clintonhead political hack spin.

I went through RCP and pulled what polling is available from the Super Tuesday states. I used RCP averages for states that they are provided for. All of these are between NH and SC, generally ranked in order with the states most recently polled listed first:

MO (2 polls): Clinton 43, Obama 27, Edwards 26
IL (1 poll): Obama 51, Clinton 22, Edwards 15
AZ (2 polls): Clinton 41, Obama 25, Edwards 12
TN (1 poll): Clinton 34, Obama 20, Edwards 16
CA (RCP Avg): Clinton 43, Obama 31, Edwards 11
AL (2 polls): Clinton 37, Obama 28, Edwards 12
NJ (RCP Avg): Clinton 46, Obama 28, Edwards 10
PA (1 Poll from Jan 11): Clinton 40, Obama 20, Edwards 11
NY (RCP Avg): Clinton 50, Obama 28, Edwards 10
GA (2 polls): Obama 39, Clinton 34, Edwards 14
MA (3 polls): Clinton 51, Obama 23, Edwards 13
CT (1 poll): Clinton 41, Obama 27, Edwards 9
PA (1 poll): Clinton 40, Obama 20, Edwards 11
OK (1 poll): Clinton 45, Edwards 25, Obama 19
MD (1 poll): Obama 39, Clinton 26, Edwards 11

A couple interesting things:

Obama is only leading in areas that could be described as his base like IL (home state), GA (large black population) and MD (limousine liberals). Clinton is leading in all of the battle ground states like: CA, PA, TN, AZ, where she is also focusing her campaign. Also, in every state Clinton is leading her lead is at least 9 points. Bottom line is, Clinton is still the front runner and Obama has a lot of ground to make up. As far as Edwards goes, once he gets his share of undecideds, I would guess he'll pick up delegates in half the states, which should be enough to make him a player at a brokered convention.

Also, I found this site with more complete state-by-state polling data than RCP.

A lot of those polls are pretty old though, and Obama is going to get a healthy SC/Kennedys/Bill Clinton is being a 5 year old bump.

I agree Hillary is the fav to be the nominee right now, but it's really close and we wont have a nom on Feb 6th.

none of this matters ron paul will win anyway.

I'm def for voting for democrats this year I always wanted to pay an 80 percent income tax

1) The delegates are awarded proportionally, so even if Clinton wins California by 5-10%, she may not end up with substantially more delegates. Consider that Clinton won Nevada by 5% but they came away with the same amount of delegates as Obama. No matter what happens on Super Tuesday, the race won't be over; this is going to go on for a while. Kingmaker Edwards hasn't had his say yet, for one. And the proportional delegate scheme is going to keep this close past Feb 5th.

2) Polls are mostly pre-SC (obviously), and the polls from states like MA were surveyed before both MA Senators endorsed Obama, etc.

Exit polling shows lots of South Carolina voters made up their minds in the last week. With a week and a half between now and Super Tuesday, there's alot of play in the joints left. This isn't to say Clinton isn't under-valued; she might be. But considering many of these polling outfits don't have nearly as much experience sampling primary voters outside of places like Iowa, NH, and SC -- and considering that pollsters have had some serious mistakes already (NH, Obama's margin of victory in SC), I'm not putting much more stock into the Super Tuesday state polls (or, more correctly, I'd put stock into them, but the market is probably already reflecting them and priced accordingly). I'm about the biggest polling apologist there is, but under no circumstances would I take that kind of analysis (looking at RCP's polls of Super Tuesday states from a week ago -> conclude Hillary is a monster favorite) and put actual money on it. Honestly, Clinton might be undervalued at bit due to post-SC euphoria, but I don't think the market is that far off here.

I'm curious as to the demographic makeup of people still voting for Edwards since they have to know he has no shot. A lot of posters here seem to take it for granted that if he got out his people would jump on Obama's bandwagon. And while Edwards probably isn't still drawing women who buy HC's boo hoo act, he might be drawing men who both don't want to vote for a woman or a black, and will decide voting for a woman is the lesser of evils. Thus Edwards might not have much to sell in the way of an endorsement, as in it wouldn't help Obama and his supporters would back HC by default. So the question is whether his hard-core supporters think there is some benefit in helping Edwards keep siphoning off enough delegates so that he does in fact have something to sell at the convention.

Yeah, I'm in the camp that isn't convinced Edwards supporters are automatically jumping to Obama's camp should Edwards bow out:

http://bob.wjla.com/headlines/0108/487188.html

"A mid-December survey of voters nationally conducted for the AP and Yahoo News found that Edwards supporters split about evenly between Clinton and Obama when asked which candidate would be their second choice. Clinton and Obama each were the second choices of about 27 percent of Edwards supporters. Another 28 percent were unsure who would be their second choice, and the rest were thinly scattered among other candidates."


So if...and this is a big *if* -- if Edwards personally supports Obama (or just dislikes Clinton more and wants to prevent her from capturing the nomination), or if Obama can promise Edwards more than Clinton -- then it's probably to Obama's advantage to have Edwards continue on in the race and secure as many delegates as he can; from the perspective of what gives Obama the best odds to win, I think this is even more preferable than having Edwards drop out and endorse Obama. Again, this is under the assumption that if Edwards really is going to play kingmaker, he prefers to coronate Obama as king.

Actually I think Edwards has the same desire for power as do the Clintons, with the attendant willingness to jetison or adopt whatever positions and use any underhanded tactics necessary. The question though is whether Billary would be willing to accept him as the VP to get it down to a headsup pot.

There is one more debate prior to Super Tuesday...so Obama has to do a solid job...and hopefully HRC will do something stupid/newsworthy.

When is that debate? I'd like to see it.

the 31st

30th I think