Super Tuesday

Good morning, all. I spent last weekend having (predictably) a thoroughly surreal weekend in Los Angeles. In between improv, Amoeba, and being asked by a bouncer if I was "one of those scientists who blows up buildings," I did manage to catch the news that Barack Obama kicked the shit out of Billary in South Carolina, and picked up the endorsement of every living Kennedy. But I missed pretty much everything else. I've been keeping up this week, but not as well as I'd like. So I'm going to skip my usual deluge of links and just go into what I see happening on Super Tuesday, because it's going to be interesting at the very least.

The Republicans

The Republican race is a little easier for me to predict than the Democrats, which is ironic because it's going to be sloppy. John McCain clearly has the national momentum going right now, and it would appear that unless he makes any serious blunders, he's going to coast right into the nomination. Right? Sort of. Pollster.com (which is a magnificent tool, by the way, and if you're interested in following poll numbers at all, you should be checking it daily) has a very interesting chart up right now showing poll numbers for 14 of the 21 states voting for the GOP on Super Tuesday. As of the time of this writing, it looks like this:


National Poll numbers look like this:



As you can see, John McCain is clearly kicking ass and taking names. This works more in his favor because the Republican system is designed to craft a mandate for the winner. About half of the states voting on Super Tuesday are winner-take-all, so whoever wins gets the whole package. Some have proportional representation, and some have a blend where it's WTA in the individual districts, and then the winners get bonus delegates for being winners. A lot of the state rules for apportioning delegates are really complicated and I won't pretend to understand them. But the point is that while McCain is clearly going to win big, Romney and Huckabee are going to take a chunk out of his ass that's only going to get more painful until the convention. Combined right now, they're polling at about the same place nationally as McCain is. Huck is going to take delegates in the South: in proportional (or semiproportional) states like Georgia, Oklahoma, and Tennessee, and his home state of Arkansas, as well as Colorado (the land that gives us Ted Haggard and James Dobson and all of those assholes). Similarly Willard "Mittens" Romney is going to pick up delegates among stick-up-the-ass conservatives in proportional (or semi-proportional) states where McCain might be leading: Illinois and California come to mind. He'll also take Utah and their 36 delegates.

In sum: McCain is going to stay on top, and he's going to keep increasing his lead. But Romney and Huckabee are going to keep racking up enough delegates to be a pain in the ass when it comes to getting his 1,191 delegates at the convention. I suspect that Huckabee will be marginalized fairly quickly, but I don't think it's beyond the realm of possibility that McCain might pull Romney in as his running mate to solidify support of the GOP establishment in Washington and to add solid business credentials to his existing pork-busting platform. I'm not saying it'll happen for sure, I'm just throwing it out there.

The Democrats

This one is oh, so much more fun, because Barack Obama isn't going to take the lead but he's going to keep it reasonably close. Let's look at the two charts from pollster.com:




What this says: Hillary will win more states, but this isn't nearly as meaningful as it is in the Republican primary, because by Democratic Party rules, all states award delegates proportionally. The momentum is clearly with Obama: those big dots in New York and California are getting closer and closer to that center line as the polls get more recent (a couple of more recent polls actually have Obama taking the lead in California). The second graph is a composite of all the national polls they can get their hands on, and charted on a best fit curve: Obama is very clearly on the upswing and Hillary is sitting there waiting to get overtaken. On the averages, Obama is about 3.5 points behind nationally. While Edwards isn't likely to endorsetoday, everything about him and his campaign suggests that his supporters will likely drift towards Obama. Let's say Obama gets 2/3 of the Edwards support and Hillary gets the other third: Obama picks up 8 points and Hillary picks up four, which puts Obama at 4.5 points ahead.

The Clinton campaign is hoping for a blowout as much as possible: they want Obama good and sunk, even if his losses are only as far as momentum and not on the numbers. Clinton has built herself a campaign built around words like "inevitable," "incumbent," and "juggernaut." That image is best served by steamrolling Obama in as many places as she can: she doesn't just need a victory, she wants an ass-kicking. If he loses bad, he's got to campaign twice as hard to keep up, which is going to be harder because his money will start to dry up.

Obama just needs to keep things close, for two reasons.

1. There are still plenty of states that vote after Tuesday, some of them with a whole lot of delegates (can anyone say Ohio?). Super Tuesday is when the media sprint is supposed to end: everyone wants a definitive victory for someone, which often means backing the winner just because you smell blood in the water. If Obama survives and can keep Hillary's numbers close, everyone realizes that this is going to be a distance race and not a sprint. The frenzy dies down a little bit and voters realize that they've really got two winners, and they can go with someone they like better. My money says that if Obama can keep it close to a tie (or better), he'll prove that he's got just as much of a juggernaut as Hillary and he doesn't raise as many hackles with voters of either party. The conventional wisdom is that Hillary is brilliant and she's cutthroat enough to win at any cost. But I suspect that voters would rather pick someone who can win in a principled battle, who will expand the party (rather than make efforts towards strategic disenfranchisement). I see Hillary as a 51%-er: someone who will do what it takes to get her 270 electoral votes and to hell with the rest. Obama wants everyone to like him, he wants to (or claims to want to) really represent all of America as best he can, and I think that lowers the collective national blood pressure just a little bit.

2. Superdelegates! That's right, regular voter-chosen delegates get to be augmented by beings whose electoral powers transcend that of mortal delegates. Superdelegates are members of the Democratic Party, Democratic members of Congress, Governors, etc. who get to vote as delegates but don't have their support pledged on their behalf by the voters. They get to vote for whoever they like, and damned if there aren't a lot of them: roughly 800 or so. When you need 2,025 delegates to win, 800 superdelegates (about 20% of the total delegate count) are real important. If Obama keeps the primary-elected delegates close, all he has to do is play the nice guy up through the convention and schmooze the hell out of the members of the party. The Clintons (both of'em) are likely to keep fighting hard and keep fighting dirty, and all Barack has to do is be charming and watch her popularity fall. By the end of August, he'll be sitting pretty to convince his fellow elected officials that he's better for the party across the board, and he can take the nomination.

In Sum:
Super Tuesday will not settle anything definitively (it's actually mathematically impossible). It will decide how hard John McCain has to barter before the convention, and it will decide the tactics of the Democratic race.

Where I personally stand on the candidates:
For all of my talking, it should be fairly obvious at this point that I'm backing Barack Obama. But honestly, it's not all that cut-and-dry. So as briefly as I can, I'm going to throw out my feelings on the six remaining candidates worth mentioning.

1. Barack Obama - I don't have quite the hopeless man-crush on Obama that some people (*coughcoughAndrewSullivancough*) do, but I do have a remarkable admiration for the man. I got a chance to see him speak at a small cafe in Chicago when he was running for the Senate primary in January of 2004, and he was every bit as smart and insightful as I could have hoped for him to be. He spoke with equal devotion to both urban renewal and rural concerns. He spoke in terms of finding practical solutions that wouldn't step on anyone's toes, which was his reputation in the Illinois legislature. Honestly, in comparison to what I know the man is capable of, Obama's campaign has been a bit of a disappointment: he has been vague (I'm pretty sick of hearing about "change," honestly; I want specifics), and he has been clumsy, and he has not been half the wily debater that I expected. But I honestly do believe that his promises to bring about a more civilized climate in Washington are not bullshit, and I believe he has the intelligence to build constructive solutions to problems in America and the charisma to get Congress to agree on them. I think he can be a great president.
   
   
2. Hillary Clinton - Hillary is a shark. She will shake any hand to get a vote ahead and stick the knife in the second someone is no longer useful. She is absolutely brilliant, and she is absolutely vicious. If there is a Democratic counterpart to Karl Rove, she is it. But this is not necessarily a bad thing. I do believe she has her ultimate goals in the right place. The Clintons have been slammed from the left for their moderation and devotion to gradual change, but more often than not, they're nudging the country in the right direction. And frankly, politics is a dirty game, and it is not at all terrible to have someone as fiercely, ruthlessly, magnificently competitive on your side. She will do whatever it takes to win, and that's what we're looking for.
   
   
3. John McCain - I disagree with John McCain on a lot of things, but I believe he would be an honorable president. I fear his dedication to continuing the Iraq war, but I believe that he will fight it with decency, without any of this torture crap, and uphold things like the Geneva Conventions and the constitutional bounds of presidential power. Honestly, if it had come three years earlier, I would have supported a plan for a troop surge, because I do tend to lean towards McCain's "you break it, you bought it" mentality. I just don't think that at this point we can really convincingly fix anything in Iraq.
   
   
4. Mike Huckabee - Mike Huckabee would not be disastrous in some ways. Unlike many in his party, he's not allergic to social spending and government programs. He understands that some people don't really get a fair shake and do need a leg up, and he'll give that to them. On the other hand, it's always a MONUMENTALLY BAD IDEA to give religious zealots control of the acquisition and disbursal of knowledge. Abstinence education leads to kids getting pregnant and getting sick. Prohibition of stem cell research costs lives. Blind devotion to the idea that your faith is absolutely right starts extraneous wars. If he were an agnostic, I wouldn't have a huge problem with Huckabee, but he is not, so I am forced to fight his campaign as hard as I can.
   
   
5. Mitt Romney - Mitt Romney is as close as this election will come to posing a candidate that represents a continuation of the Bush years. What's worse, he didn't used to believe all of this crap: he used to be far more reasonable, and he's manufactured the jibberish he's spewing now. But to be fair, George W. Bush can barely speak English and ran several companies into the ground. Mitt Romney is as slick as he can get without sliding off the stage and he's been a magnificently successful businessman. At least that's sort of an improvement? Right? Right?
   
   
6. Ron Paul - Once again, I have major problems with some of Ron Paul's beliefs. But he is more dedicated to his principles than anyone still in the race (in either party), he has done more to invigorate the formerly-non-voting populace than anyone other than Barack Obama, and he's the only GOP candidate opposed to the war in Iraq. I consider myself to be a states' rights liberal, and while I think there are some problems that can only dealt with on a federal level, I appreciate Ron Paul's dedication to delegating as much of it as possible to governments who can focus on problems locally and specifically. I eagerly anticipate his third-party run.