Why couldn’t Hillary win Louisiana & Missouri?

 

The latest argument to come from the Clinton camp to explain why Hillary still thinks she should be the Democratic Party's nominee is that she is the only one who can win the big swing states that have picked the President for the last however-many elections. This is partly because she's losing to Sen. Obama in States-won, Pledged Delegates, Superdelegates, and the popular vote but it's also because Sen. Obama has won a number of swing states like Colorado and Wisconsin — which are equally important in a strategic sense, but didn't happen to coincidentally swing the way of the winner every time.

 

So apparently the new measure, and the only one that we are to believe matters — aside from white voters who didn't go to college (according to Sen. Clinton) –  are the states that are not only so-called "swing states" but also had the coincidence of voting for the candidate that happened to win. Well, even on that count she can't claim exclusivity. There are six states that have a history of "voting with the winner" for the past 10 or more elections: Arkansas, Kentucky, Louisiana, Missouri, Tennessee and West Virginia. Of them, Sen. Obama was the winner in Missouri and won by a wide margin in Louisiana.

 

That brings me to my question: Why couldn't Hillary beat Obama in Louisiana? We keep hearing so much about "Why couldn't Sen. Obama win white working class voters?" or whatever metric the Clinton camp is imagining to be the all-important barometer in this campaign. Since the new metric is "States that pick the President" then I'd have to ask Hillary why she couldn't beat Obama in  2 of these 6 states.

 

For certain, Sen. Clinton would appear to have a 4 to 2 advantage in this narrow arena, but the ultimate point is that she is losing in every other metric, of course there are going to be metrics where she is winning, but the best she can do is claim the election depends entirely on these 6 states, and by her own measure she can't even win all 6 of them.

 

Of course, I'm not counting on the probability that Sen. Clinton would respond by coming up with some clever explanation as to why Missouri and Louisiana don't count, but really isn't that the point? They've already dismissed the importance of the black vote by implying that they're only voting for Obama because he's black, as if that makes the votes count less. Hillary doesn't get nearly as much of the women's vote as Barack gets of the African American vote, but that's been dismissed.

 

Caucuses (which have gone largely for Obama) have been dismissed by Clinton as un-democratic, yet Hillary has said repeatedly that the Superdelegates (who are even more un-democratic) should be the deciding factor in this contest and should not base their votes on the democratic votes of their constituencies but instead base it on the extremely undemocratic method of guessing who has a better chance of beating McCain in November.

 

To bring this hypocrisy home, the latest polls show that Clinton can't even carry half of the swing-states that supposedly favor her. Kentucky and Tennessee are expected to go for McCain in November. This seeming-contradiction is easily explained by the fact that none of these primary results are reliable indicators for the general election which basically means there's no possible way she can reasonably claim winning in one state or another makes her more electable. But she does anyway.

 

Obama didn't lose to John McCain in those states, he lost to Hillary Clinton — and many of those voters will cross over and vote for him if it's him vs. McCain. Similarly, Hillary did not beat John McCain in the states she won, she beat Barack Obama. Many of Obama's supporters will cross over for her too, but it won't matter if the Democrats in a given state are in the clear minority, such as in Kentucky and Tennessee. Not even Sen. Clinton's beloved Michigan is expected to go Democratic in the fall, despite how important she insists it is in this primary process.

 

On the other hand, current polling shows Obama could deliver both Colorado and Virginia for the Democrats, important states that open up new paths to a November victory that are not open to Sen. Clinton. In fact, SurveyUSA's electoral maps overlayed with their polls suggests that Sen. Obama would beat McCain more easily, with more electoral votes than Sen. Clinton.

 

Ultimately Sen. Clinton is simply blowing smoke. In the end, most of the people who voted for her will support Obama in November, despite her attempts to make it seem (and perhaps even attempts to make it actually) otherwise. Against McCain both candidates both similarly, and both of them have clear electoral paths to victory in November, but Sen. Obama has won nearly twice as many states as Sen. Clinton, he has a strong lead in both pledged delegates and the popular vote, and is even leading now in declared superdelegates. Sen. Clinton has no reasonable argument, in fact has nothing but increasingly bizarre and cherry-picked metrics to point to as she continues to insist that she is the stronger candidate.

 

In the end, the national polls show that this country prefers either candidate to McCain by similar margins and shows that either candidate can beat McCain in the electoral college, but the Democratic primaries clearly show that between Sen. Obama and Sen. Clinton Democrats prefer Obama by a clear margin.

 

By all means, allow Hillary to play this out until all the primaries have taken place and the situation with Michigan and Florida is resolved to the satisfaction of both states, but in the end Sen. Clinton will still have absolutely no claim on the nomination because she's simply too far behind in pledged delegates (without MI and FL she needs 94% of all remaining to overtake Obama. With those states decided the way she wants them to be she still needs nearly 80% of all remaining delegates) and her argument that she is more electable is based on the imaginary-fact that the states that voted for her are more important than states that voted Obama, and the complete fantasy that those primary results will have any bearing at all on the election in November — and that's if nearly all remaining superdelegates, given a good reason, are even willing to overturn the decision of the pledged delegates.