After more than 40 Democratic primaries and caucuses, Obama, the Illinois senator, leads Clinton by more than 800,000 votes. Even if the New York senator wins by more than 20 percentage points tomorrow -- a landslide few experts expect -- she would still have a hard time catching him....Not at all certain? I assume they mean almost impossible, assuming Barack's campaign doesn't somehow implode. Obama has been consistently polling 13+ points over Clinton in North Carolina and looks to handily take S.D. and Oregon (although polling has been sparse). Additionally, Obama has about 5 times the amount of cash on hand, something that will all but prevent a 20 point win in any of those Clinton-must-dominate states (maybe with the exception of Puerto Rico). Anyway, more from Bloomberg:
To earn that split decision, though, Clinton would need a 25-point victory in Pennsylvania, plus 20-point wins in later contests in West Virginia, Kentucky and Puerto Rico. Even that scenario assumes Clinton, 60, would break even in Indiana, North Carolina, South Dakota, Montana and Oregon -- a prospect that's not at all certain.
More than just big margins, Clinton would need record voter turnout too. In Pennsylvania, she would need a turnout of 2 million, about half the state's registered Democrats; in the 2004 primary, about 800,000 voted. She would also need turnout to almost double in other states where she leads, and reach some 1 million in Puerto Rico, which is about how many Democratic- leaning voters went to the polls in a 2004 gubernatorial election. The territory, known for its high turnout, didn't have a presidential primary that year.
In Pennsylvania -- where a Bloomberg/Los Angeles Times poll gave her just a five-point margin last week -- Clinton would need to win a strong majority of the state's suburban voters, about half of male voters, three-quarters of the rural vote and probably 70 percent of white voters, says Chris Borick, director of the Muhlenberg College Institute of Public Opinion in Allentown. She would also have to erode Obama's strength among black voters and college students...
To shrink Obama's 800,000 popular-vote margin, the Clinton campaign argues for the inclusion of votes cast in Michigan and Florida... There's almost no chance that party officials will give credence to those results. ``No one is going to buy the argument that you have to count Michigan and Florida,'' says Allan Lichtman, a professor of political history at American University in Washington. ``Those were not contested primaries.''Right... so what's the argument for staying in the race?
Instead, Clinton's slim prospects may rest on persuading enough of the 795 superdelegates that she has the better chance of defeating McCain... Polls on the general election don't support the case that Clinton would make the stronger national candidate; they show little difference in head-to-head match-ups between McCain, the 71-year-old Arizona senator and presumptive Republican nominee, and either Clinton or Obama.
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