When it comes to Super Tuesday (or Tsunami Tuesday, or Super D’ Duper Tuesday), watching the results come in will be a little tricky, at least on the Democratic side. We’re accustomed to looking at these contests and considering who gets the most votes — Obama won Iowa, Clinton won New Hampshire, etc.
But as the race for delegates grows in significance, it’s become increasingly obvious that simply tuning in tonight to see which candidates won which states will give an incomplete picture. With this in mind, the NYT’s Adam Nagourney offers a helpful suggestion:
[T]he big question is how much attention to pay to the results map on television — lighted up with, say, states that have swung to Senator John McCain’s column — and how much attention to pay to the delegate counter. The answer is pay attention to both, though put somewhat more focus on states for the Republicans and put somewhat more on delegates for the Democrats. The delegate count might matter more officially, but the state results could count more politically, and that will be the central tension of the night.
Democrats allocate most of their delegates proportionately; candidates are awarded a cut of the delegate pie based on their percentage of the vote. It is possible to lose a state and still get a majority of the delegates, and it is likely that the losing candidate will still get a substantial share of the delegates.
Senators Barack Obama and Hillary Rodham Clinton will no doubt start claiming state victories as soon they can — with the goal of trying to get on television and grab the front-runner spotlight — but those results will probably remain largely symbolic. Assuming the race remains close, what matters going forward is who gets the most pledged delegates.
It reminds me a bit of last week, when there was a debate over whether anyone should take the results of the Florida Democratic primary seriously. It became a “perceptions and expectations” game — it mattered if the media said it mattered. As it turns out, John Edwards dropped out the morning after, and Florida quickly became an afterthought. As a result, the momentum didn’t shift to Clinton, even after she won a big state (in which no one campaigned).
I suspect tonight will be similar. Clinton, I cautiously assume, will win most of the Democratic contests. But how the results are perceived will make all the difference — if the headline reads, “Clinton cruises to victory in most Super Tuesday states,” she’ll have momentum going into the next round of contests and solidify her position as the frontrunner. If it reads, “Clinton, Obama split delegates on Super Tuesday,” it’ll be a wash.
Nagourney’s choice of words was especially interesting: state-by-state victories are “largely symbolic.” If other campaign reporters treat today’s contests the same way, the effects will be pretty interesting.
On a related note, TNR’s Christopher Orr, an admitted Obama supporter, made an interesting observation about this same perceptions and expectations game.
[W]hile much has been made (and rightly so) of the extreme difficulty for Obama of having to compete simultaneously in 22 states with a well-known quasi-incumbent such as Clinton, there is, I think, a silver lining: specifically, that, however many states Clinton carries (assuming it’s not an utter blowout), today will feel like a single “win” in terms of the broader narrative of the campaign.
Meanwhile, the primaries that are scattered throughout the rest of the month are generally Obama-friendly and take place not more than two or three per day: Louisiana on Saturday; Maine on Sunday; Virginia, Maryland, and DC next Tuesday; and Hawaii, Washington, and Wisconsin a week after that. Obama ought to win most of these, and could even run the table. Though it might not make any difference from a delegate standpoint, if Obama strings together three or four winning days in a row, it’ll be hard to shake a sense of gathering momentum. (And, in politics, perceived momentum often translates into the real thing.)
To put it another way, if the Super Tuesday states were stretched out over a week or so, and Clinton won New York today, followed by California on Saturday, followed by Connecticut, Massachusetts and New Jersey next week, she’d probably knock Obama out of the race. As it is, he can lose all those states and live to fight another day.
I think that last point is probably the most persuasive. I suspect Obama may very well lose all five of those contests, but if it’s perceived as one rough day — a rough day in which Obama still wins a lot of delegates from each of the states — it’s easier to bounce back.
In this respect, Obama has to lose just well enough. Markos explained this very well:
It’s about the reality of the situation. Obama has been slowly building up, and has had to overcome huge advantages enjoyed by the Clintons. It’s about the calendar (see below), and how it plays to Obama’s strengths later in the month. There’s no need to bet everything on tomorrow. It’s all about how well he loses. The narrower the loss, the bigger his actual victory.
Quite right. What I don’t understand, then, is the spin from Obama supporters the past few days about him winning a bunch of key contests. It’s possible, I suppose, but they’re setting expectations in the wrong direction, relying on poll outliers and a sense that momentum alone can carry him across the finish line in some big states.
This strikes me as foolish, not because it can’t happen, but because Obama’s backers should be spinning the opposite.