There’s been quite a bit of talk this morning about reported changes in the Clinton campaign’s staff.
Members of Hillary Clinton’s advance staff received calls and emails this evening from headquarters summoning them to New York City Tuesday night, and telling them their roles on the campaign are ending, two Clinton staffers tell my colleague Amie Parnes.
The advance staffers — most of them now in Puerto Rico, South Dakota, and Montana — are being given the options of going to New York for a final day Tuesday, or going home, the aides said. The move is a sign that the campaign is beginning to shed — at least — some of its staff. The advance staff is responsible for arranging the candidate’s events around the country.
I’m not quite convinced that this is indicative of anything significant. With the last of the primaries wrapping up tomorrow, the Clinton campaign’s focus will shift to either a) ending the campaign and stepping aside; or b) investing time and resources in convincing Obama delegates to switch their commitments.
Given this, it stands to reason that Clinton will need a much smaller advance staff. Whether she’s in the race for three more days or three more months, these aren’t the kind of staffers she’ll need. Just because she’s scaling back in this department doesn’t necessarily point to a pending withdrawal.
As for the rest of the strategy, between now and the end of Clinton’s campaign, it will be all popular vote, all the time.
Mrs. Clinton, in the interview, in a new television advertisement and in her victory speech in San Juan, laid out why superdelegates should rally around her. She argued that by the time the final vote is counted, she will have more popular votes than Mr. Obama, an assertion that has been disputed.
“I think it will be most likely the case in a few days,” Mrs. Clinton said from San Juan. “I will have won the most votes — more than anyone in the history of the primary process.”
She added: “Senator Obama has a narrow lead in delegates. And we’re going to have to make our case to the automatic so-called superdelegates. And I think my case is clear — more than 17 million people voted for me.
“In recent primary history, we have never nominated someone who has not won the popular vote.”
That’s largely true. It’s been nearly four decades since Dems nominated a candidate who didn’t win the popular vote. Of course, Dems have never nominated a candidate who didn’t win the race for delegates, either, so either outcome is going to be rather unusual.
Now, as it happens, the discussion over which Dem won the popular vote is one of the more frustrating aspects of the intra-party debate, not because it’s a tangential metric, but because it’s practically impossible to get a reliable count.
Iowa, Nevada, Washington state, and Maine haven’t released popular vote totals. We can make educated guesses, but they’re not precise. How do we count non-binding primaries? Do we count voters who can’t participate in the general election (from territories, for example)? How many voters supported Obama in Michigan? It gets a little complicated. Depending on which measurement you prefer, you can say Obama has a very narrow popular-vote lead, or Clinton has a very narrow popular-vote lead.
It does, however, help explain the Clinton campaign strategy over the last few weeks. She campaigned very heavily in contests she was certain to win anyway — West Virginia, Kentucky, Puerto Rico — not because she was worried about losing, but because she needed strong showings to boost her popular vote totals. As Greg Sargent noted over the weekend, “[T]he last few weeks of the race … were about nothing other than running up the popular vote in a last-ditch effort to argue that Democrats hadn’t rendered a clear verdict on their choice of nominee.”
It’s unlikely this will work, but given Obama’s delegate lead, it makes sense.