Here's the latest interesting news:
-The latest polls have Clinton with a lead of 1-3 points only: Alabama, Arizona, Missouri (Reuters =1) Connecticut, Colorado, New Jersey (Reuters =1).
-Obama is leading widely in Illinois, Georgia, and Utah
-Clinton is leading in New York, Mass, Tennessee, Oklahoma, Minnesota by large margins
-The Field poll has Clinton with a 2 point lead in CA; Zogby/Reuters has Obama with a 4 point lead in California.
-National polls show Clinton's lead over Obama anywhere from 2-11 points, with wide variability. More recent polls show a much tighter race.
-All polls show around 10% undecided in most races.
Super Tuesday is shaping up to be razor thin everywhere. It will be a fun night for pollwatchers.
Sunday, February 03, 2008
A tightening primary race for Democrats
Posted by The Law Talking Guy at 9:34 AM
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3 comments:
In CA, 2.3m absentee ballots have come in, many before Edwards dropped out. Assuming the majority are for the Democratic party for a variety of reasons, that suggests about 1.3m absentee ballots total already cast. (Since absentee ballots actually tend to be majority Republican, this is a very liberal estimate of the # of Dem absentees). The total primary vote is hard to predict. According to our SecState, 700,000 new voters joined the rolls in January alone. But in past elections, the Democratic primaries have attracted around 7.5m voters. So that suggests that about 1/6 of the vote has been cast already in the Dem primary, a big plus for Clinton who probably leads in that earlier voting group, particularly with Edwards voters who might otherwise have voted for Obama. Of course, given the large # of independents that may show up, or other factors, it's safe to say that no more than 1/6 of the vote has already been cast in the Democratic primary.
What does this mean? It means that Clinton has the advantage in CA, but probably not as great an advantage as she hopes or Obama supporters fear.
It is also worth noting that delegate selection for the Dems in CA is on a per-congressional-district basis. And there are between 3-6 delegates available per district. In most cases, the winner gets 3 and the loser 2. This will be true unless the vote count goes so lopsided that 4-1 split is reasonable. So what will matter is not so much the concentration of votes in urban Dem strongholds, but the breadth of support statewide. Put another way, 51% of the Fresno county area will register as many delegates 65% of Berkeley. That favors Obama in the delegate count (in every state so far, Obama has won the Democratic vote in non-urban areas).
That distribution mechanism made a huge difference in Nevada where Clinton had a fairly comfortable lead in percentage of voters supporting her but because her support was almost exclusively concentrated in Las Vegas where Obama had support spread throughout the state, Obama won the same number of delegates that Clinton did.
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