Monday, March 03, 2008

Up In The Air

Polls are tightening up across the board. David Kurtz at Talking Points Memo has a quality post summarizing recent movements. Using pollster.com data (a poll of polls), Obama has a .2% lead in Texas, and Clinton is up by 6% in Ohio. An Obama sweep, despite his massive gains in recent weeks, seems extremely unlikely.

And that is significant. If he is able to pull it off, Hillary is going to have trouble justifying staying in the race--but a split gives her an angle to keep on battling. Considering Obama's amazing string of victories--and largely landslide victories, at that--stopping his momentum is no easy task. But her strong comebacks and possible victories against great odds can be spun as a return to viability.

Now, I'm not saying that she'll ride tomorrow to a primary victory; even with a sweep there is virtually no chance that she'll make up enough pledged delegates to put much of a dent in Obama's lead, and superdelegates will almost certainly continue to shift towards Obama. But it does give her an excuse to stay in. Despite the calls from a number of party leaders, I don't see the race ending for another few weeks at least.

Thoughts?

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Huge snowstorm moving from west to east across Ohio tomorrow...could be a big factor in the ever-important turnout game. Whose supporters do we think are more likely to weather the winter terror? Something to keep in mind: Obama is depending quite heavily on large independent/Republican turnout in the Democratic primary, since thse groups support him by an overwhelming margin...if you're a Republican, are you really going to brave an ice storm just to have a say in the other party's race? This could definitely hurt his chances of staging an upset tomorrow.