There are a variety of annoying angles to the Democratic presidential race, but one of the more jarring elements is the fact that we’re seeing the same arguments played out, over and over again. Some of these questions have been played out repeatedly, and yet we seem to forget the particulars.
At the top of the list is the notion that primary results are a reliable predictor of general-election results. If a candidate win’s a state’s primary, the argument goes, it means he or she is more likely to win it in November. If a candidate loses a primary, he or she is likely to lose the state in November.
We’ve been down this road before, and apparently, we’re headed down it again.
Reflecting on her victory in the Pennsylvania primary, Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton on Wednesday neatly summed up the chief political rationale of her enduring candidacy.
“I won the states that we have to win — Ohio, now Pennsylvania,” Mrs. Clinton said on CNN about her successes over Senator Barack Obama, in one of her six appearances on morning news shows. “It’s very hard to imagine a Democrat getting to the White House without winning those states.”
There are compelling reasons to vote for Clinton, but this isn’t one of them.
The NYT noted, for example, that “exit polling and independent political analysts offer evidence that Mr. Obama could do just as well as Mrs. Clinton among blocs of voters with whom he now runs behind. Obama advisers say he also appears well-positioned to win swing states and believe he would have a strong shot at winning traditional Republican states like Virginia. According to surveys of Pennsylvania voters leaving the polls on Tuesday, Mr. Obama would draw majorities of support from lower-income voters and less-educated ones — just as Mrs. Clinton would against Mr. McCain, even though those voters have favored her over Mr. Obama in the primaries.”
Moreover, when it comes to predictive indicators, “state primary results do not necessarily translate into general election victories.”
Obama, for example, won in Maryland, Vermont, and Illinois, three reliably Democratic states. It is, to borrow a phrase, “very hard to imagine a Democrat getting to the White House” if the party’s nominee loses states like these. But to assume that Clinton can’t win Maryland, Vermont, and Illinois is silly; just because she lost the primaries there doesn’t mean she’d lose them in the general election.
Jeff Greenfield had a good item about this back on March 11 (I mention the date only to emphasize how long we’ve been mulling over the same topic), which noted that primary results cannot “provide a guide to the fall campaign.”
I offer this blindingly obvious point to suggest why it is mostly a fool’s errand to find autumn portents in winter and spring primaries. To be even more blindingly obvious, the great majority of voters do not participate in the primaries…. Any extrapolation about voting blocs based on primary results has to confront that elemental difference.
Jonathan Chait added yesterday:
As my colleague Chris Orr has just burst into my office to point out — don’t be alarmed, he does this several times a day — right now Obama is having a hard time winning blue collar whites on the economy in large part because he has an opponent with a virtually identical economic platform. When he has an opponent who’s tethered himself to President Bush’s highly unpopular economic policies, winning over blue collar whites on the economy will get a lot easier. Extrapolating from primary dynamics to general election dynamics is very dicey business.
And Josh Marshall and the TPM team pored over some of the available data.
There’s not a lot of good or consistent polling state by state yet. But we were looking today at what polling data is out there. Clinton is running a bit better against McCain in the rustbelt states that sit just above the Mason-Dixon line. That’s principally Ohio (see Ohio polls) and Pennsylvania (see PA polls). The state where you see this pattern more wildly than anywhere is in Kentucky. (See KY polls). Clinton loses to McCain there but respectably, whereas Obama simply gets slaughtered. SurveyUSA has polled the state three times in the last eight weeks and the last two times McCain beats Obama better than two to one.
Kentucky isn’t really an issue in itself. It’s highly unlikely either Democrat would win it. But it’s the best example I’ve seen where Clinton appears to run dramatically stronger than Obama.
But this isn’t the whole story. In a whole arc of territory stretching from the Great Lakes through the upper Midwest down into the inter-mountain West Obama consistently runs stronger than Hillary. Some of these states are ones Democrats really must win in order to win a general election — states like Iowa, Wisconsin and Michigan.
Others are states red states that have been trending blue but which Obama appears able to put in play while Hillary can’t. Colorado is a good example. The last four polls of the state show Obama tied or ahead of McCain while McCain beats Hillary handily. The most recent poll — April 21st — has Obama beating McCain by 3 points while McCain is beating Hillary by 14 points.
Given the spottiness of state by state polls, for now it’s best to watch the national popular vote polls, which show the two Democrats basically even in how they’d face McCain. But there are differences. They run better in different parts of the country. But the ‘big state’ argument is just malarkey, an artifact of the spin necessities of the post-Super Tuesday campaign.
I suspect this will remain a lingering question, but it shouldn’t.