Super Tuesday Follow-ups
Random ramblings …..
Mitt Romney, the talkers propping him up, and a large swath of Old Media all received a serious and richly deserved comeuppance last night. Mike Huckabee is correct when he says it’s a two-person race, and he’s the second.
Nobody will give credit where credit is due for this, so I will — Gregg Jackson, John Haskins, the Mass Resistance folks, and others associated with them had a significant role in both helping Huckabee and hurting Romney. They reached out to their like-minded brethren throughout the country. I won’t tell you how, but they did it, and it worked. I’d like to think what has been posted here also had a bit of an effect.
$100 million doesn’t go as far as it used to, Mr. Romney.
Understand something about the Democrats: They are MORE divided than the GOP. In most states, delegates are chosen by the vote tally in small areas. So you would expect a close race to split the delegates 50-50, which has generally happened, and a popular-vote blowout to lead to the winning candidate taking all, or almost all, of the state’s delegates. That is indeed what mostly happened on the GOP side (examples: CA, GA, IL).
But on the Dem side, look at the biggest blowouts: AL (Obama +15), GA (Obama +35), IL (Obama +31), MA (Clinton +15), NY (Clinton +17), and OK (Clinton +24). In each of these states, the loser got a stunning number of delegates. This shows that there are clearly deep divides in the party. I would suggest that they are between black (Obama) vs. white (Clinton), urban (Obama) vs. suburban/rural (Clinton), and perhaps hard-core activists and Kossacks (Obama) vs. traditional rank and file (Clinton). The most visible example of the divide, never mind the delegates, is how Obama made up a 20-plus point deficit in Missouri when the votes from heavily black St. Louis County rolled in. The most obvious example of the delegate skew is Obama taking 87 of 204 New York delegates in the process of losing the popular vote by 17 points.
It looks like Ohio will matter on the Dem side, perhaps not on the GOP side.
There are divides in the Democrat Party, but they are nowhere near as wide or as deep as among the Republicans. The fact is, they have two strong leaders - and the vast majority of supporters of one would turn out in November to support the others. (If you can stomach a few moments at DailyKos you will see many comments to this effect.) Sure Hillary will lose a few African Americans and disaffected young people if she gets the nod, but most of them will come back to the fold when they are reminded very vocally by the Clintons and their media cronies about the hideous Republican alternative. Any attempt at equivalence with the situation on the Right is false. Millions of people are falling all over themselves swearing to never vote for McCain, something you would never see on the Left.
And the turnout numbers among Democrats say it all.
Claiming they are more divided than the GOP = pig + lipstick.
Comment by Brendan — February 6, 2008 @ 3:40 pm