She's inflicted some serious wounds on Obama, but the way she's done it has made it all but impossible for superdelegates to accept her as an alternative. His supporters are too angry over her tactics to accept her on the basis of electability alone. Obama emerges from Pennsylvania damaged, but choosing Hillary instead would shatter the party. (Even the New York Times finds her campaign strategy "mean, vacuous, and pandering.")
Ironically, a smaller margin in Pennsylvania would have helped her more than this one did, if she had won it cleanly. Instead she's won a genuine -- but Pyrrhic -- victory, one that doesn't advance her chances for the nomination. And the damage to the party's November prospects is deep and lasting.
Why I Predicted the PA Results Exactly Right
Posted April 23, 2008 | 10:44 AM (EST)
Reliable polls taken in the last 2-3 days showed Clinton beating Obama by an average of 5.8%. But the day before the primary I predicted the spread would be 9.5%. Current reports place it at 9.3%, with 99% of precincts reporting.1 Why did I get it so right when the polls got it so wrong?
One reason is dumb luck. Accurate predictions are difficult with numbers as fuzzy as polling data. That said, there are other, more ominous reasons why I did better than the pollsters. The one that should be of greatest concern to the Democrats is the Bradley Effect, where white voters are reluctant to tell pollsters that they won't vote for a black candidate. While the Bradley Effect is highly controversial, the Texas and Ohio results persuaded me that it's real. So I increased Clinton's margin accordingly.
It didn't have to be this way. In the first few months of the campaign, a great many voters didn't seem to perceive Obama as "black." Pundit talk that he was somehow "postracial," possibly as a result of his multi-ethnic parentage, seemed to reflect itself in public reaction to his candidacy. There would have been a Bradley Effect in any case, but it might have been smaller than it turned out to be yesterday in Pennsylvania.
