It figures, doesn’t it? After 16 months of campaigning, primaries and caucuses in 43 states, a couple dozen debates, and ungodly sums of money spent on campaign ads, Pennsylvania was poised to make a real difference. A landslide win by Hillary Clinton (as predicted by initial polls in March) might have fundamentally reshaped the race. A narrow win by Hillary Clinton (as predicted by early exit polls released last night) would have made it difficult for Clinton to continue.<\/p>\n
So, what happens? She wins by 9.4% — a number Clinton supporters round up to call it a double-digit win, and Obama supporters round down for the opposite reason. Clinton’s victory was decisive and impressive, but the margin fits nicely into that middle ground. It’s big enough to give Clinton a boost, but not big enough to change the overall dynamics of the race. It’s big enough to keep the campaign going for quite a while, but not big enough to compel uncommitted superdelegates to get off the fence.<\/p>\n
In other words, after six weeks of campaigning in the Keystone State, and about $40 million of investment, the Democratic Party is largely where it was a month ago.<\/p>\n
There have been plenty of surprises in the Democratic race over the last several months, but for a change, Pennsylvania seemed to go according to plan. The conventional wisdom, oddly enough, actually got this one right<\/a>.<\/p>\n For all the campaigning and money spent, Hillary Rodham Clinton won Pennsylvania with the same base of white women, working-class voters and white men that revived her candidacy in Ohio last month. The demography that has defined the Democratic race went largely unchanged, according to exit polls.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n In other words, the constituencies that were expected to back Clinton did so, and those who were expected to back Obama did so, too. In Pennsylvania, Clinton’s constituencies are larger, so she won. Most notably, the knock on Obama this morning seems to be that he can’t “close the deal,” or “land the knock-out punch.” He outspent Clinton by more than a 2-to-1 margin, but when the dust settled, Obama couldn’t take advantage of the opportunity to end the Democratic race once and for all.<\/p>\n On the other hand, the last several weeks have been brutal for Obama. After Wright, bitter-gate, and lackluster debate performance, he didn’t make gains among Clinton’s working-class white base, but he didn’t lose ground<\/a>, either.<\/p>\n What’s more, Clinton’s path to the Democratic nomination is no clearer now than it was 24 hours ago. It’s all-but official<\/a> that she won’t catch Obama among pledged delegates, and the popular-vote contest is quite likely to break Obama’s way, too. As Noam Scheiber explained<\/a> last night:<\/p>\n [Clinton] only marginally improved her chances of winning the nomination, and they weren’t high to begin with. She barely dented Obama’s pledged delegate lead (she probably made up about 15-20 of his 165-delegate margin), and there are few indications that the superdelegates are prepared to overturn it. (Obviously, stay tuned over the next few days to see what the supers do.) That’s particularly so if Hillary can’t pass Obama in the popular vote, and she probably didn’t make up enough ground tonight to have a shot. <\/p>\n The bottom line is that Hillary needs an Obama meltdown to have a real path to the nomination. After all the uproar about Jeremiah Wright and bittergate, that didn’t come close to happening tonight. What did happen was that all the people who think the extended nomination fight is killing party got a lot more depressed.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n So, all the talk we heard in March will continue to May, and probably longer. We’re going to hear a lot about “the math” vs. “the momentum.” “The numbers” vs. “the narrative.”<\/p>\n The show It figures, doesn’t it? After 16 months of campaigning, primaries and caucuses in 43 states, a couple dozen debates, and ungodly sums of money spent on campaign ads, Pennsylvania was poised to make a real difference. A landslide win by Hillary Clinton (as predicted by initial polls in March) might have fundamentally reshaped the race. […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[617],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-15305","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-general"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15305","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=15305"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15305\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=15305"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=15305"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=15305"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
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\nIt’s maddening, but every spin seems to have an equal and opposite re-spin.<\/p>\nmust<\/strike> will go on.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"