Primaries Without End, Amen

[babylonsister]

Primaries Without End, Amen

This is the "show me the demographics and I'll tell you the winner" Democratic presidential contest. Why bother to hold elections?


Harold Meyerson | March 5, 2008 | web only



This isn't an election, it's a political census. The Democratic primary process of 2008 is proceeding like a reading of The Almanac of American Politics. Here' s Ohio -- white working-class, no new jobs, young people fleeing to Chicago, California, or points east; advantage Clinton. Here's Maryland, upscale professionals and African Americans; advantage Obama. And here's Texas, huge Latino vote eclipses black vote while whites largely split; advantage Clinton.

This is the show-me-the-demographics-and-I'll-tell-you-the-winner Democratic presidential contest. Whites in all white states go Obama; whites in black-white states go Clinton. Older voters, Clinton; younger voters, Obama. Older white voters for whom nearly every change in the last 30 years has been for the worse -- that is, the Midwestern working class -- don't seem drawn to the candidate of change. It's all there in the statistics. Why bother to hold elections?

In fact, all but about 10 states have voted now, and only Wisconsin stands out for violating this rule. In Wisconsin, Barack Obama won the very same white working-class voters who elsewhere voted for Hillary Clinton. Electoral scholars will one day ponder what prompted this Wisconsin exceptionalism, but for our purposes, as we look ahead to those final 10 states, it's hard to imagine where Obama can duplicate that singular triumph, or where Clinton can win over the kind of voters who have been flocking to him. Can she snatch away Oregon? Improbable. Can he win Pennsylvania, where the mine-and-mill ghost towns -- inhabited, but antique -- between Philadelphia and Pittsburgh make Ohio's economy look like a veritable Silicon Valley by comparison? Not likely.

It would be nice if one of them did break through to the other side, did start winning voters out of the other candidate's base. That would give superdelegates some tangible achievement on which they could base their vote. Because if Florida (retirees) and Michigan (white working class) have primaries rescheduled for June, and Clinton wins them both by dint of demographics, then it's possible the delegate and popular vote counts may be nearly even at the close of the primary season. Which would put the superdelegates in a justifiable dither: If the primary contest is done and it comes out even, and if the dividing lines in the party aren't those of policy but those of identity -- what, dear God, is a superdelegate to do then? And how should the supes calculate the candidates' respective strengths against John McCain?

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http://www.prospect.org/cs/articles?article=primaries_without_end_amen