With pre-primary polls showing Clinton set to clobber Obama by 37 points in the Mountain State, her staff didn’t bother to wait for the returns to roll in before they began to brag. In a memo emailed to reporters around 1:00 p.m., Team Clinton ticked off the reasons “Why West Virginia Matters”: as the “presumptive nominee,” Obama “outspent us on advertising,” “sent “more staff” to the state, opened “more than double the number of offices” and “benefited” from the backing of Sen. Jay Rockefeller and Congressman Nick Rahall, West Virginia’s top elected officials. But despite all those advantages, they added, Obama couldn’t “close a significant gap.” Fair enough; Clinton did, after all, win by 41 points–one of the largest primary margins so far this season. At a different place and time–say, before she failed to meet her own expectations in Indiana and North Carolina on May 6–such boastful spin might have sounded pretty convincing. “In Washington, some people say the presidential primary in West Virginia doesn’t much matter,” she told voters in a last-minute radio ad. “But you know what? Tuesday, we can show ’em.”
Unfortunately for the former First Lady, who spent the past week hawking her new populist message in Appalachian hamlets from Webster to Clear Fork, the one thing worth bragging about in this twilight phase of the interminable Democratic nominating contest is the one thing she still doesn’t have on her side: the math. Trailing Obama by 170 delegates, she’s 316 short of the nomination. The problem? There are only 189 delegates available in the remaining primaries. Assuming Clinton splits them with her rival, she’d still have to win 94 percent of the uncommitted superdelegates to reach the magic 2,025 majority. That seems unlikely–to put it mildly. In the past week alone, Obama has added 30 superdelegates to his tally (or more than Clinton would’ve gained if she’d won every single Mountain State vote). Clinton’s take? Three. Tonight, West Virginia didn’t reveal any new voting patterns; everyone is well aware that blue-collar Dems prefer Clinton to Obama. So it won’t convince the superdelegates to suddenly change their minds. “Obama is so far ahead at this point, it is hard to see anything we do, even big wins, being a game-changer,” a senior adviser told the New York Times this morning. Regardless of what Clinton says on the stump or on the radio, that’s not just Beltway chatter. It’s reality.
Still, it doesn’t mean that Obama’s evening was any more enjoyable. Last week, Bill Clinton told voters in Madison, W. Va. that he’s “hoping… Hillary can get eighty percent of the vote,” and yesterday in Logan, State Senate majority leader Harry Truman Chafin raised the stakes further. “We’ve got to give her a vote tomorrow of 80-20 or 90-10,” he said. “Let’s get the national media’s attention.” Tonight, the Obama camp wants to spin the gap between those predictions and Clinton’s actual, 41-point margin as some sort of letdown. Phooey. For Obama, the only Mountain State numbers that matter–other than his painfully meager 26 percent of the overall vote–are 72, 24, 20 and two-thirds. The first–72 percent–is the share of white Democrats who supported Clinton. The second–24 percent–is Obama’s share of the same swath of the electorate. The third–20 percent–is the percentage of whites who said the race of the candidate was a factor in their vote, second only to Mississippi. And the fourth–two-thirds–is the percentage of those Democratic voters who said they’d support John McCain over Obama in the fall. What’s more, Obama lost white women 22-73; white men 30-60; and whites earning less than $50,000 a year 24-72. Fifty-two percent of Democrats said Obama didn’t share their values; 47 percent said they’d vote for McCain or refrain from voting instead.
This doesn’t bode well for Obama’s general-election chances in the Mountain State. It’s true that there’s no direct link between primary results and general election performance; after all, Obama won’t lose Massachusetts to McCain just because Clinton trounced him there on Feb. 5. And as the Obama campaign noted in an email to reporters this afternoon, the Illinois senator is “running as well or better than past Democratic candidates among white voters” nationally versus McCain. But the general election is a series of swing state battles, and West Virginia is a swing state–that just so happens to be very poor and very, very white (like, 94 percent). While Obama’s deficits in Pennsylvania and Ohio (9 points or so) were small enough–and the states themselves were diverse enough–to render any November predictions completely bogus, it’s almost impossible to imagine Obama overcoming a deficit more than four times as large in a state that’s almost uniformly populated by a white, working-class, less-educated Appalachian demographic group widely opposed to his candidacy. Especially against a crossover candidate like McCain. So, like his predecessors John Kerry and Al Gore, Obama should be prepared to lose West Virginia’s five electoral votes on Election Day. It’s not a crushing blow, by any means–and Clinton would be no shoo-in, either–but it would make a razor-close contest with McCain that much harder to win. And remember (as Clinton keeps reminding us): no Democrat has captured the White House without the Mountain State since 1916.
Clearly, Obama would rather not linger–or have the press linger–on that sobering thought. In keeping with the pattern of the week, Clinton spent election night celebrating in Charleston, W.Va, and Obama, whose four-hour visit Monday was his first and only stop in the state since March 20, stayed as far away as possible, choosing instead to hold an economic discussion in the swing state of Missouri and forgo any sort of Primary Night address. The decision was revealing. While Clinton deals with the contest one day at a time, Obama is already pivoting to the general election. After Missouri, he travels Wednesday to Michigan for the first time in 10 months, targeting Reagan Democrats in suburban Detroit and reassuring voters that he wants the state’s rogue delegation seated at August’s convention, then continues on to the other scofflaw state of Florida next week for three days of stumping, fundraising and huddling with party activists. Meanwhile, Obama has focused his rhetorical fire exclusively on McCain over the past seven days, excising Clinton’s name from his usual attacks on what was, until last Tuesday, “the McCain-Clinton gas-tax gimmick.” “[McCain’s] only answer to the problems created by George Bush’s policies is to give them another four years to fail,” he said today in Missouri. “Just look at where he stands and you’ll see that a vote for John McCain is a vote for George Bush’s third term.” In Chicago, the campaign has even “begun collecting resumes for communications staff for the general election.” And friendlier terrain awaits Obama in Oregon, South Dakota and Montana.
For her part, Clinton is moving a little slower. According to the Times, she plans to spend Wednesday meeting with advisers and top fund-raisers to discuss the future of the campaign, and despite public pronouncements from her perpetually effervescent campaign chairman Terry McAuliffe (“We are going through to June 3”), aides would only say that they “believed she was likely to remain in the race until the Kentucky primary next Tuesday”–another guaranteed blowout. That seems like a safe bet. Still, the biggest remaining question about Clinton’s candidacy–or, rather, its conclusion–isn’t “when?” but “how?” With $20 million in debt and fundraising slowed to a trickle, Clinton can’t afford to run a full-on, scorched-earth campaign through the convention unless she loans herself another $11 million–at least. But the truth is, the money isn’t nearly as prohibitive as the politics. When Clinton noted in an interview with USA Today last week that “Sen. Obama’s support among working, hard-working Americans, white Americans, is weakening again,” the reaction was swift and stinging. Quit playing the race card, cried the chatterati. (Incidentally, a lot more West Virginians thought Clinton attacked Obama unfairly [59 percent] than vice versa [50 percent], despite her overwhelming win). Whether Clinton was sowing division or simply discussing demographics, she seems to have decided since then to limit her analysis to her own strengths, rather than her rival’s soft spots. In fact, the Clintonites’ afternoon memo–unlike, say, the previous Pennsylvania edition–didn’t even mention the words “blue-collar” or “working class,” let alone “white.” Her strategists have likely concluded that any efforts to link race with electability will only further alienate superdelegates reluctant to back her in response to an argument based, in part, on voters’ perceived bigotry–meaning that the final leg of her campaign should be as polite, if determined, as tonight’s victory speech.
But just because an argument is politically counterproductive doesn’t mean it’s untrue, at least locally. Today, the Democrats of West Virginia did nothing to move Clinton closer to the White House–all while revealing how difficult it will be for their probable nominee to win the state in November. Talk about a lose-lose situation.
