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What Pennsylvania Means

By pharrell

I'm back from three weeks in Philadelphia. I'm obviously disappointed by what happened Tuesday, though happy that we kept it to less than 10 points and excited by the energy and enthusiasm of all the volunteers I worked with.

The national media have been playing Pennsylvania as a potential game-changer for the Democratic race, one that has party elders (read: super-delegates) beginning to doubt Obama's strength as a potential general election nominee. This is an over-hyped storyline, and one that overlooks the fact--well-known to super-delegates--that there is little correlation between a candidate's ability to win particular primaries and his or her ability to win a general election some months later.

What I find most interesting about the Pennsylvania results, on the other hand, is how little they differed from the situation several weeks before Pennsylvania voters actually went to the polls. Obama deserves credit for turning the 20 point gap that existed six weeks out into a 9 point loss on election day, but the last few weeks of the campaign saw almost no movement, despite millions of dollars in ad spending, increasingly negative attacks from the Clinton camp, the Reverend Wright blow up, Sen. Clinton's Tuzla remarks, and Sen. Obama's "bitter" comment, each of which dominated the news cycle for a couple of days. This frozen nature of the race is, of course, a bigger problem for Hillary--given that Obama has more supporters, she has to start winning them over to have any chance of winning overall--but if Obama's going to win this race before the end of June, he needs to figure out how to unfreeze it. Perhaps he'll unveil something new in Indiana.

Full post as published by Harrell Blog on April 26, 2008 (boomark / email).