Bluegrass Blues
Posted on May 20th, 2008
by Daniel Larison |
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On his way to a 35-point loss in Kentucky, Obama did manage to win two counties. Mind you, those were apparently two out of the three counties in which he managed to get more than 40% of the vote. Some of the lowlights included Magoffin County in the eastern part of the state, where he picked up 5% of the vote to Clinton’s 93. She has netted something like 240,000 votes. Needless to say, Clinton has never suffered two primary defeats of such magnitude in consecutive weeks, or indeed at any time during the last five months, and it will be pretty much unprecedented to nominate the candidate who has lost two consecutive primaries this badly. Oregon can soften the blow later tonight, but it won’t undo the damage.
Filed under: politics
I just don’t buy it. This isn’t really damage to Obama. It’s mostly unprecedented to nominate a candidate who has lost two consecutive primaries this badly because primary elections are rarely competitive. While it’s not the same thing, it’s easy enough to point out states that McCain lost very very badly - Utah by about 85%, for instance, or Alaska, where he finished fourth.
Obviously Kentucky and West Virginia have not provided the best signs in the world for Obama’s general election chances in those states, but it’s worth keeping in mind that he has not really run away with this election. It’s a close primary election and he’s won it, but he hasn’t won it in a walk. There’s no shame in that and no reason to worry overmuch about it. Sometimes elections are just close, even if primary elections usually aren’t. That he has beaten Clinton at all is pretty remarkable given where we were a year ago.
I’m not talking about caucuses. Losing consecutive primaries by 30+ points is pretty bad no matter how you slice it. Yes, he has accomplished remarkable things and done far, far more than I ever expected he or any non-Clinton would this year, but he has left Clinton the tiniest window of opportunity and she is going to exploit it to his detriment.
Extrapolating the exit polling, it looks like 55-45 for Obama in Oregon. I’m not sure by what margin Clinton would have had to win Kentucky for it to be significant, but from what I’m seeing not much is being made of it. It’s not just the expectations game that hurts her. The big thing is CV is that her margin was pretty much driven by racists. Winning that demographic is like getting the Hamas endorsement.
Sadly, I believe you’re right about that. Clinton is going to jam her foot in the door and leave it there as long as possible. That said, the party seems to be forsaking her. The Gallup tracking poll info from today is really telling; she’s losing her credibility fast. Hopefully that’s enough to move her out of the way.
This is an unprecedented election. All bets are off*.
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*Tacos excepted.
The greater, long term problem for Obama is that those counties in eastern KY and the western part of WV are far and away the most Democratic counties historically. When you get beat 95-5 you have a serious problem. WV and KY are almost certainly out of reach, but with VA and CO there is certainly an electoral math game plan that is well within reach for Obama.
Mind you, that Magoffin County was a sparsely inhabited county, but there were results like that all over eastern Kentucky.
Rasmussen has him ahead in Colorado. Colorado increasingly looks like the better case of a state that he is likely to flip. For Colorado to put him in a position to win, he has to be sure that he locks down those core states in the Upper Midwest that were narrowly for Kerry last time. Certainly, much has changed in four years, so we might suppose that those states are much more solidly Democratic, but Obama’s numbers don’t show that yet.