There are competing tallies showing how Democratic superdelegates are planning to vote — it’s not an exact science, and some of these party leaders are still changing their minds — but by one updated count, Hillary Clinton now has the support of 252 superdelegates, 24 more than Barack Obama’s 228. That leaves 314 uncommitted, sought-after superdelegates.
Howard Dean, who’s been pushing the undecideds with varying degrees of subtlety, is growing more and more impatient with each passing week.
An increasingly firm Howard Dean told CNN again Thursday that he needs superdelegates to say who they’re for – and “I need them to say who they’re for starting now.”
“We cannot give up two or three months of active campaigning and healing time,” the Democratic National Committee Chairman told CNN’s Wolf Blitzer. “We’ve got to know who our nominee is.”
It appears that the uncommitted superdelegates have other ideas. USA Today and Gannett News Service spoke with “dozens” of them, and found that “they feel little pressure to resolve the heated nomination battle before the last primaries on June 3. Few said they expected the ongoing fight to damage their party’s chances in November.”
While that’s certainly a debatable point — I’m inclined to disagree with it — USA Today did add, “Most of the undecideds said they expect to make their choices known by July 1 — a deadline proposed recently by DNC Chairman Howard Dean — to avoid a showdown at the party’s Aug. 25-28 convention in Denver.” (This is at least mildly encouraging — 10 more weeks of intra-party wrangling is preferable to 18.)
Nevertheless, what’s likely to move the uncommitted superdelegates in one direction or the other?
In recent weeks, a handful of Obama-related flaps — Wright, “bitter,” Ayers, etc. — have been touted by the Clinton campaign and its supporters as the kind of stories that could sway superdelegates. In fact, that’s partly their job — take into consideration controversies that might matter in a general election.
The New York Times spoke with 15 uncommitted superdelegates who were largely underwhelmed by recent headlines.
[D]espite giving it her best shot in what might have been their final debate, interviews on Thursday with a cross-section of these superdelegates — members of Congress, elected officials and party leaders — showed that none had been persuaded much by her attacks on Mr. Obama’s strength as a potential Democratic nominee, his recent gaffes and his relationships with his former pastor and with a onetime member of the Weather Underground. […]
In interviews, 15 uncommitted superdelegates said they did not believe that recent gaffes by both candidates would carry any particular influence over their final decision. They said they had particularly tired of all the attention, by the Clinton campaign and the news media, on Mr. Obama’s recent comment that some Americans were “bitter” over the economy and chose to “cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren’t like them” as a result.
And if there were some moments of concern reflected in the debate — the talk of Mrs. Clinton’s high unfavorability ratings, Mr. Obama’s flashes of annoyance — they all doubted that those moments would be deal-breakers, either. Instead, most of the superdelegates said they wanted to wait for the results of at least the next major primaries — in Pennsylvania on Tuesday and Indiana and North Carolina two weeks later — before choosing a candidate.
In this respect, neither Obama nor Clinton are getting exactly what they want from these guys. Obama wants the uncommitted superdelegates to help him end the race by announcing their support immediately. They won’t. And Clinton wants them to consider the mini-controversies that have dominated the news lately and perceive Obama as unelectable. They won’t do that, either.
Stay tuned.