Breaking Away
By Charlie Cook
© National Journal Group Inc.
February 9, 2008
This column was originally featured in National Journal on February 9, 2008.
The bottom line coming out of Super Tuesday is that John McCain is now the prohibitive favorite for the Republican presidential nomination, but Democrats are in for a knock-down, drag-out fight. The Democratic contest will not be settled before March, and possibly not before April. There's even a slim chance that it could go all the way to the national convention in late August.
With 1,191 delegates needed to secure the Republican nomination, ABC News projections put McCain in the lead with 696 delegates, followed by Mitt Romney with 253 and Mike Huckabee with 187. CBS counts 699 delegates for McCain, 162 for Huckabee, and 157 for Romney. CNN shows 680 for McCain, 270 for Romney, and 176 for Huckabee. NBC's numbers crunchers say that McCain has 720, Romney has 256, and Huckabee has 194.
But by all counts, McCain holds a commanding lead. With many of the GOP's winner-take-all states now having voted, trailing candidates will have a very difficult time trying to catch him. Indeed, it requires some creative thinking to come up with any scenario in which McCain could lose the nomination. The longer that Huckabee stays in the race, the harder it becomes for the self-funding Romney to have a real chance of coalescing the anti-McCain forces behind him. And the longer this remains a three-man race, the less likely an "anybody but McCain" effort will succeed.
But on the Democratic side, the struggle for the nomination is going to be a fight over inches, not feet or yards. To win, a candidate needs 2,025 delegates. Hillary Rodham Clinton's delegate total, according to ABC News, is 1,038 to Barack Obama's 941. CBS has her ahead, 1,063 to 986. The CNN count is 818 for Clinton to 730 for Obama, while NBC shows the tally to be in Obama's favor, 838 to 834.
By some calculations, Obama won an infinitesimal majority of the delegates up for grabs on Super Tuesday and, thus, has maintained a tiny lead among pledged delegates. But when the current preferences of "superdelegates" are factored in, Clinton has a small edge in total delegates, at least according to ABC, CBS, and CNN.
In a pre-Super Tuesday analysis, two leading experts on the convoluted Democratic delegate-selection process, Anthony Corrado, a professor of government at Colby College, and political consultant Tad Devine, wrote, "Under proportional representation, it is very difficult to achieve a significant delegate margin, especially in districts with an even number of delegates." But, they added, "just as it is difficult for a winner under proportional representation to gain a significant delegate advantage, so too is it difficult for the trailing candidate to overcome any sizable lead held by the front-runner. Such a lead would be difficult to overcome unless the trailing candidate was able to turn the tide in subsequent elections or draw on the support of superdelegates to overcome the gap produced by state voting."
At this point, neither Clinton nor Obama has a significant delegate advantage. But Corrado and Devine do spotlight dynamics that we need to watch: the difficulty of building a big lead, and the difficulty of overtaking a front-runner with one. Obama is widely thought to have an edge in many of this month's remaining contests -- first in Louisiana, and then in Maryland, Virginia, and the District of Columbia. However, in early March, the fight moves on to Ohio and Texas, bigger states where Clinton might have the upper hand.
In the coming weeks, we may well see some back and forth, with one candidate finally emerging with a small, sustainable advantage. One question to ask as the battle continues is whether the edge of the front-runner at any given moment is in pledged delegates or primarily in superdelegates. Another is whether seating the delegations from Michigan and Florida -- rules-breaking states that Clinton won after the national party stripped them of their delegates -- would make a difference.
The odds of a presidential nomination contest going all the way to a national convention are quite small, but the Clinton-Obama race could conceivably not be settled until Democrats gather in Denver. Considering that not long ago the Republican contest looked much more likely to be the one that turned into an extended fight, this continues to be a truly amazing campaign. |
