So Much For Polls and Prophesies

Last week about this time I was prophesying that by about this time this week the Billarys might have opened up some significant breathing room between them and the upstart Barackster. So much for the polls, which in this volatile campaign are about as useful as yesterday’s racing form. Nor, so it appears, did I account sufficiently for the Democrats’ screwy system of proportional delegate allocation. Billary held on in most of the big ‘uns, thanks in no small measure to heavy early, pre-Obama surge voting in California. If the polls are a joke in this wholly unstable political climate, one can only speculate about how many early voters would now like to have their ballots back. Commentators continue to point to Obama’s strength among blacks, of course, and they were so pre-programmed on the idea that southern whites wouldn’t vote for him that they were at a loss for words when exit polls showed him getting 43 percent of the white vote in Georgia. One wonders whether this is a register of changing attitudes toward blacks or persisting hatred of Hillary. The answer is doubtless some of both, although, hardened cynic that I am, I have been struck by decreasing resonance of race among young folk in the South and elsewhere. White women are the very core of Hillary’s constituency, a fact that her campaign is trying to conceal by trumpeting her appeal to Hispanics. The Hispanic vote is big in California and significant in several other states, but turnout and cohesion are concerns in places where they aren’t part of unionized workforces. The attention given the Caroline Kennedy/Maria Shriver endorsement of Obama reflects the importance to his campaign of wooing away some of Hillary’s female following. There is an interesting dynamic operating, I think, among liberal women who are torn between the prospect of cracking the glass ceiling in a big way and a sense that they should be more intent on helping Obama break through another ceiling that has been much lower and oppressive. At this point, with 2025 delegates required to sew up the nomination, my buds at RealClear politics.com show Billary with 897 to Oby’s 822. These figures include those among the 796 unpledged “superdelegates” whose affinities for each candidate are known. Many of these folks, who are generally elected officials or party bigwigs of some stripe, have reportedly gone underground to escape heavy lobbying from both camps. It’s possible that unless the remaining primaries break sharply in one direction or the other, the superdelegates will be more interested in national polls addressing a candidate’s electability in November. If the nomination is ultimately decided by convention-floor hustling of these Super-Duper party insiders, and the nod goes to the Billarys, then the Obama-ites are going to be really pissed. Ditto this if Hillary manages somehow to claim the vaporized delegates from Michigan and Florida. If Obama’s poll numbers continue to rise and he shows up much more impressively than the Billarys in the head-to-head with McCain, most of the superdelegates are probably too desperate to get one of their own back in the White House to take a header with Hillary. However, if the contest for their affections comes down to lobbying, lying, backstabbing or bribing, bet on the Billarys making their acceptance speech while Barack tries to figure out who stole his jockstrap.

Over on the Republican side, things are going a lot more smoothly for John McCain. Pastor Mike has just about shot his Bible-belt wad and appears to be running for VP. ( Why not? It’s not as though he has lots of options, unless somebody has an opening for a religious zealot in residence.) Romney did somewhat better than expected yesterday, embodying, one suspects, the last expulsion of hate-filled, fire-rimmed flatulence generated by the Rush Limbaugh/Ann Coulter “McCain is the Anti-Christ” crowd. On Super Tuesday, I asked my class of three hundred how many had voted or planned to. I counted at most six hands. I thought that this pretty well contradicted all the reports of youthful enthusiasm for this campaign. Then I realized that these stories had been largely focused on the Obama phenomenon, and concluded that six Democrats out of three hundred would be about right for Georgia.

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This page contains a single entry by Jim Cobb published on February 6, 2008 10:23 AM.

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