Whether it’s a race for governor, senator, mayor, or city council, in the U.S. it’s usually pretty easy to determine who’s won—count the votes, see who has more, and call it a day.
Tuesday’s primary is not so simple. Hillary Clinton and her supporters know that victories in Pennsylvania and all the remaining contests will not erase Barack Obama’s lead in pledged delegates. Nor would they erase his lead in the popular vote. Yet Clinton stays in the race, hoping for something that will woo enough remaining unannounced superdelegates into her fold.
And by doing so, she twists the campaign into semiotic knots. For instance, winning Pennsylvania hardly matters to the math of the race, but it’s vital to one of Clinton’s few remaining arguments to the superdelegates: that late victories mean more than their meager impact on the math would suggest.
That makes questions of performance, especially Clinton’s final margin (a victory of some sort is widely presumed), all the more important.
On Monday, Matt Drudge entered the conversation with this headline: “CLINTON INTERNALS SHOW 11-POINT LEAD IN PA.” Drudge’s flash cited a “senior campaign source,” and it became a piece of the day’s campaign buzz.
“Drudge is touting it as an exclusive,” said Mike Flannery, a longtime political reporter for WBBM, Chicago’s CBS affiliate. He was huddling on the sidelines of an outdoor Obama event in suburban Blue Bell with his producer, Ed Marshall, and reading Drudge’s item from his BlackBerry.
Why, when all campaigns typically want to do is suppress expectations, would Clinton’s campaign leak numbers like this? “She’s raised the bar for herself,” Flannery suggested.
“If it’s accurate,” added Marshall.
“On the other hand, it creates a bandwagon effect,” Flannery said. “They’re trying to create something like that. I think this probably is real. I don’t know if her polling is real.”
For what it’s worth, later in the day Clinton spokesman Howard Wolfson “categorically” denied that the campaign had leaked any polls to Drudge, and claimed dirty tricks, calling the item “an obvious effort to raise our expectations by somebody.”
No word, of course, on who that somebody might be. But the (leakable? deniable? fabricated?) item underlines the importance of the expectations debate.
And both sides are taking part. Obama’s campaign has been working to paint anything less than a Clinton blowout as a Clinton defeat. On Saturday, his people e-mailed a release cataloguing old and not-so-old statements—from Clinton’s campaign, media watchers, surrogates—suggesting that victory in Pennsylvania meant winning big.
The Obama perspective has gained some sympathy among the press.
“I hate to quote myself, but if you look at the story I did on Sunday, I said a single-digit loss would be a victory,” says Lynne Sweet, Washington bureau chief of the Chicago Sun-Times. “And since I’ve written it, I can’t change what I’ve said!”
Sweet’s piece points out reasons Pennsylvania was always an uphill battle for Obama: the state’s demographics are more closely aligned with Clinton’s base; only registered Democrats are able to vote, so Obama can’t count on support from independents or Republicans.
John Harwood, who covers the campaign for The New York Times and CNBC, had a more straightforward definition of victory.
“I tend to think a victory is a victory. I think if she wins by any margin, she’ll be in the race for at least another two weeks,” he said. “Clearly if she loses, it will knock her out.”
But what if it’s a narrow victory? “By definition, it’s still a victory,” says Harwood, before cautioning that size does matter: the bigger the victory, the more she has to show the superdelegates.
John Micek of the Allentown Morning Call agrees: “A strong showing here helps her in the long run with the superdelegate argument.”
Or, as Clinton’s own campaign put it in a release to reporters, “If Senator Obama is unable to do well here, it will raise questions about his ability to win the large, swing states that he needs to win to take the election in November.”
Further complicating the picture, as always, are party rules governing the distribution of delegates. Of the 158 delegates up for grabs on Tuesday, 103 will be chosen based on the results in each congressional district. Congressional districts with more Democratic voters get more delegates. These districts are concentrated around Philadelphia. And they have higher average incomes, and larger black populations. These are all factors that suggest Obama could do well in Tuesday’s delegate race, even if he doesn’t win the raw vote.
“On Texas night, we were down at the Alamo,” says Flannery, referencing the site of Obama’s March 4 rally. “What was reported that night was that she had won two big victories.”
But as time passed, more Texas delegates (due to the “two-step” primary/caucus hybrid system) went to Obama than to Clinton. Flannery and Marshall are mindful that Pennsylvania could produce another split verdict.
“If she wins by only one half of one point, then he’s going to cream her in delegates. He’s going to get 10 to 15 more delegates than she. Half the delegates are in 7 or 8 congressional districts around Philly,” says Flannery. “This is really all about the super dupers.”
“You need an excuse to get off the fence and try wrap this thing up so it doesn’t turn into a summer,” Marshall said.
“But you also need cover. You also need cover. They don’t want to be seen as making the decision,” said Flannery.
“An eleven-point victory is cover,” said Marshall, thinking back to Drudge’s item.
“Here’s how you define victory,” concluded Flannery with a laugh, “a victory is a result that gives cover to the Pennsylvania super dupers, that gives them an alibi—We’re redefining this obviously.”
Clint Hendler is the managing editor of Mother Jones, and a former deputy editor of CJR.