February 29th, 2008 by SHAUN MULLEN
<...>
Clinton is likely to lose Texas because there is no potentially controversial photograph of Barack Obama at this late date that could check the extraordinary momentum that he has kept building and building. Seriously folks, she has simply run out of effective talking points because she had too few to begin with in a campaign smugly predicated on the aura of experience and inevitability, while Obama will be able to outspend her for TV commercials and other advertising by a 2-1 margin.
In fact, Clinton may lose the delegate race by a wider margin than the popular vote because of what wags refer to as the “Texas Two-Step.”
This is a system that her campaign had to acknowledge it didn’t even understand until last week, much too late for it to try to change another set of rules that it found to be inconvenient. Some 126 delegates will be designated by primary vote results and 67 decided in caucus elections attended by people who enrolled for them when they voted. The remaining 35 are superdelegates.
Clinton’s campaign never gave a prairie dog’s ass about building grassroots organizations state by state as Obama has done to great effect in all 50 and this will hurt her in Texas.
The substantially larger Obama ground operations have repeatedly tripped her up as Obama has amassed 10 of his 11 straight victories by margins greater than 20 percent and by a mere 17 percent in Wisconsin, yet another state that had seemed tailor made for a candidate who was fitting herself for a tiara before the first primary vote was counted.
The Texas system will be especially cruel to Clinton because Obama is likely to pick up the lion’s share of the 67 caucus delegates. With the exception of Nevada way back on January 19, Obama’s hyper-committed supporters have killed Clinton at caucuses.
Wait! It gets worse for Clinton.
The delegate apportionment of the primary popular vote will be based on turnout in the 2004 and 2006 Democratic primaries. Turnout was highest in African-American areas of Dallas and Houston and in Austin and environs, home to the rich liberals who have turned out in droves for Obama in other states. Clinton is likely to pick up comparatively few delegates in areas heavy with the Latino voters who were going to be her firewall.
moreHow did this happen, start here:
by: Phillip Martin
Mon Feb 18, 2008 at 08:30 AM CST
This is very strange:
According to a report in today's Washington Post (thanks to our
Kossack friends for the tip), Senator Clinton's campaign is worried about the Texas primary system, and apparently some are only now learning how it works. From the Washington Post article titled, "
System Worries Clinton Backers":
Several top Clinton strategists and fundraisers became alarmed after learning of the state's unusual provisions during a closed-door strategy meeting this month, according to one person who attended.
What Clinton aides discovered is that in certain targeted districts, such as Democratic state Sen. Juan Hinojosa's heavily Hispanic Senate district in the Rio Grande Valley, Clinton could win an overwhelming majority of votes but gain only a small edge in delegates. At the same time, a win in the more urban districts where Sen. Barack Obama expects to receive significant support -- could yield three or four times as many delegates.
They're only learning about this this month??? They must not be regular readers of BOR.
The night of Super Tuesday, I spent several hours reading up about the TX primary system. The next day, I looked at the incredibly useful
Lone Star Project report about the numbers, and asked a lot of questions about how it worked. On Thursday, I wrote these two long posts explaining the Texas primary and delegate system, and on Friday February 8 (ten days ago) these two posts were published on BOR:
*
Explaining the Delegate Process, Part 1*
Explaining the Delegate Process, Part 2That was two weeks ago. Last week, both KT and I wrote about how Senator Obama will do well in TX:
*
How Barack Obama Can Win Texas*
Clinton Up 49-41 in Texas Poll; Obama May Win More DelegatesI'm a 23-year old grad student who is not even living in Texas right now. KT is younger than I am, and just moved back to Texas a few months ago. How is it that Senator Clinton's campaign was not prepared for Texas?
The truth is, Senator Clinton's campaign never planned on having to run after Super Tuesday. They chose a handful of key states to focus on, and thought that would put them over the top. Meanwhile, Senator Obama worked in every state, picked up lots of little states to blunt Senator Clinton's California momentum, and has been racking up wins ever since.
Many state elected officials are complaining that the Texas primary process isn't fair -- that the formulas unfairly hurt the Hispanic districts (a process that they voted to ratify at the 2006 state convention). Well, the truth is, the formula rewards the Democrats that have been showing up to the polls consistently over the past couple of years in the general election to support our presidential and statewide candidates. As TDP Chair Boyd Richie explained in the Post article:
moreGood lord, let’s see if I have this right. The Clinton campaign decides to cede every post-Super Tuesday state to Obama under the theory that Texas and Ohio will be strong firewalls. After –
after – implementing this Rudy-esque strategy, they “discovered” that the archaic Texas rules will almost certainly result in a split delegate count (at best).
While they were busy “discovering” the rules, however, the Obama campaign had people on the ground in Texas explaining the system, organizing precincts, and making Powerpoints. I know because I went to one of these meetings a week ago. I should have invited Mark Penn I suppose. (
ed. Maybe foresight is an obsolete macrotrend.)
In this respect, Texas is simply a microcosm of the larger campaign dynamics. In fact, if the Clinton campaign were a corporation, the shareholders would have pretty good grounds for a derivative suit for Texas alone.
linkThen there is the nonexistence of Hillary's ground game, including Bill Clinton passing on incorrect information.
by: Karl-Thomas Musselman
Mon Feb 25, 2008 at 03:04 PM CST
Not that this comes as a shock or a surprise, but Texas is on the verge of not mattering in the presidential primary March 4th... at least according to Bill Clinton in his interview with ABC News.
"If you vote early or you vote on March the 4th in the popular election, 65 percent of the delegates will be selected to the national convention. But 35 percent of the delegates for the national convention will be selected Tuesday night, March 4, at 8000 Percent Convention all across this state," Clinton told the crowd in Killeen this morning.
"The doors open at 7 and they close at 7:15. It would be tragic if Hillary were to win this election in the daytime and somebody were to come in at night and take it away."
Yes, believe it or not, Texas could simultaneously matter... and not matter. Aren't we special!
Of course, the Clintons are well on the way to not mattering in the Texas caucuses if Bill Clinton keeps informing people that "the door open at 7:00 and close at 7:15". This is mainly because the doors actually open at 7:15 and have no specific set time to close.
moreMaybe there was too much reliance on Bill's popularity and Hillary's history in Texas, which was touted in a February 25 Reuters' article that was picked up by every news organiztion from the
Boston Globe to the
Washington Post:
By Claudia Parsons
<...>
Clinton's history in Texas dates from 1972, when she worked on Democrat George McGovern's presidential campaign registering voters. Her team also points to the popularity of former President Clinton among Hispanic voters, a quarter of the Texas electorate.
Obama's state director for Texas, Adrian Saenz, said the campaign understood the bar was high because of the Clintons' history and popularity. He said Obama, an Illinois senator who would be the first black U.S. president if elected, had spread his resources throughout the state to counter Clinton's strength, especially among Hispanics.
"The notion was that Senator Clinton was really strong in south Texas and that was Clinton country down there," he said. "She was down there this week and drew a crowd. We were down there a couple days later and drew a crowd that was almost twice as big."
Saenz said Obama's campaign had some 125,000 volunteers statewide and a few hundred volunteers had recently come in from other states.
moreToday, the WSJ featured one Obama's volunteers:
Freaking Awesome. Go
read it now.
(Obama's) organization in the Lone Star State, which holds its potentially decisive presidential primary on Tuesday, has been "more like a baling wire and duct tape thing," says Mitch Stewart, who is running the campaign here. Mr. Stewart and the first dozen paid Obama staffers touched down in this capital city less than three weeks ago.
The uncharacteristic late start has left the Illinois senator relying to an unusual degree on the groundwork of volunteers such as Ian Davis. The 29-year-old Austin community organizer has been laboring for months with no guidance at all from Obama headquarters. When Sen. Obama's team finally arrived, Mr. Davis handed over laundry baskets stuffed with 20,000 handwritten names of potential volunteers, which Mr. Davis had gathered on his own.
"At the end of the day," Mr. Stewart says, it will be people like Ian Davis "who win this thing."
Congrats Ian. Our hats are off to you.
That's a sign of
commitment on the part of the Obama campaign and his supporters.
On the other hand, Hillary's campaign has been
poorly mananged and
woefully unprepared.
Since they didn’t build an effective ground campaign or take the time to become familiar with the rules,
again, are they going to file a
lawsuit,
again?
Then there is the bizarre recurring message --- nothing says losing like running a national campaign on the premise that some of the
primaries and caucuses don’t count.
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