Bill Clinton, campaigning in West Virginia last week, argued that Mountain State voters could “make the earth move” and fundamentally change the nature of the Democratic presidential race if they supported his wife with 80% support and a turnout of 600,000 voters. Needless to say, yesterday’s results were impressive for the Clinton campaign, but not that impressive.
As expected, Clinton cruised to an easy 42-point victory in West Virginia, winning 67% to 25% for Barack Obama. Turnout was relatively strong, at a quarter of a million voters. Clinton’s showing was the second best of the entire campaign — she won 70% of the vote in Arkansas on Super Tuesday — but fell short of some of the record-setting performances of this year’s process (Obama won 74% or better in Alaska, D.C., Hawaii, Idaho, and Kansas).
Also as expected, racial considerations played a very significant role.
Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton won a lopsided victory on Tuesday over Senator Barack Obama in the West Virginia primary, where racial considerations emerged as an unusually salient factor. Mrs. Clinton drew strong support from white, working-class voters, who have spurned Mr. Obama in recent contests.
The number of white Democratic voters who said race had influenced their choices on Tuesday was among the highest recorded in voter surveys in the nomination fight. Two in 10 white West Virginia voters said race was an important factor in their votes. More than 8 in 10 who said it factored in their votes backed Mrs. Clinton, according to exit polls.
How serious were identity-politics considerations? John Edwards — who dropped out of the race in January — got 7% of the vote. That’s quite a few West Virginians who seemed to be saying, “We don’t like the black guy or the woman from New York.”
So, what happens now? Not a whole lot.
John Dickerson noted, “So, the Democratic race may supply us with the kind of headline you’d expect to see in the Onion: ‘Clinton Wins in Landslide, Drops Out of Race.'”
Of course, Clinton isn’t dropping out of the race (I’ll have more on this in a subsequent post), so the satirical headline is imprecise, but the point is well taken — Clinton won an easy victory in an Appalachian state filled with the voters least likely to back Obama, who didn’t even try to compete in the primary. The result was so predictable, for the first time this year, the LA Times didn’t even put a story about a primary result on its front page. The pressure to end the nominating fight remains unchanged.
There was one slight twist in the post-election spin, when Clinton declared West Virginia a swing state and said it was she, not Obama, who has performed best in swing states nationwide.
As the Clinton campaign noted in a strategy memo on Tuesday, no Democrat has won the White House without winning West Virginia since 1916. Bill Clinton carried it in 1992 and 1996. Al Gore and John Kerry lost the state in 2000 and 2004, respectively.
The argument is not without flaw. For one thing, Democratic candidates have lost West Virginia’s primary, gone on to win the nomination, and then won West Virginia in the general election anyway. For another, as Matt Yglesias noted in a mocking tone, “[N]o Democrat has won the White House without carrying Minnesota since 1912 (it went for Teddy Roosevelt’s Bull Moose party) so given that Obama won Minnesota and Clinton won West Virginia, McCain is guaranteed to win the general election unless the eventual nominee can somehow completely replicate the social and political conditions prevailing in pre-WWI America.”
For that matter, I’m not sure if the swing-state argument is the most compelling one for the Clinton team. Even if we designate West Virginia as a swing state (it’s a dubious proposition in light of Bush’s 13-point victory there four years ago), Obama seems to have just as strong a swing-state case to make, if not more so — he’s won Colorado, Iowa, Minnesota, Missouri, Virginia, and Wisconsin.
The Clinton campaign will no doubt return to uncommitted superdelegates, pointing to Obama’s poor showing among lower-income, less-educated whites. The Obama campaign began trying to change the question in a memo released a few hours before polls closed in West Virginia.
“Nationally, Obama is running stronger among Independent voters than any winning Presidential candidate since 1988 and is significantly outperforming Sen. Clinton among these voters as well in general election polling,” the memo said.
The memo also dismissed as a “myth” the notion that “Obama cannot perform strongly enough among white voters.”
“Obama … is running as well or better than past Democratic candidates among white voters,” the memo said, showing he currently holds a share of white support similar to that Al Gore and John Kerry held in their head-to-head contests in 2000 and 2004.
Moving forward, the factors to consider this week include a) whether the Clinton campaign can raise a significant amount of money off its West Virginia victory, as it did after the Pennsylvania primary; and b) whether yesterday’s result slows down the superdelegate shift to Obama that seems to have begun in earnest over the last week or so.
Will West Virginia make a difference in the nomination fight? It seems unlikely, and given the landscape, Clinton seems to have effectively run out of chances to turn things around. The earth, in other words, has not moved.