Obama pulls ahead in delegates, Huckabee challenges Washington GOP
February 11th, 2008
Obama has been ahead of Clinton in pledged delegates for a little while now. These are the delegates a candidate gets for winning primaries and caucuses. Despite Obama winning 19 contests to Clinton’s 10 and pulling ahead in the popular vote as well, Clinton had retained a lead through her support from Super Delegates. Super Delegates are Democratic members of congress, governors, former party leaders (Bill Clinton, Al Gore, Terry McAuliffe, Tom Daschle, etc.) and other party insiders. There are about 800 of them, making them a voting block bigger than twice the size of California.
Unlike the pledged state delegates, Super Delegates can vote for anyone they want and change their minds at any time.
The Clinton and Obama campaigns have been wooing these DNC insiders for months. A report in The Washington Post over the weekend cited a Super Delegate who had been called by both campaigns repeatedly and finally decided to throw her support to Hillary after Bill Clinton called her. Bill had given her husband an administration post in the past. The story highlights the insider, institutional strength of Billary. It amazing Obama has received the Super Delegates he has.
But all that aside…
Obama’s five bigger-than-expected wins over the weekend put him ahead of Clinton in both pledged and super delegates. If you saw the Sunday morning talk shows or TPM’s recap, (which were recorded before Obama’s surprise win yesterday in Maine) you can see that every news organization has a different estimate of how many delegates each candidate has. Among the reasons why the estimates are all different is that in some cases although the voting/caucusing is over, the delegates don’t officially get awarded until a later state convention.
CBS’s estimated tally - which seems the most balanced for Clinton and Obama - shows Barack getting the lead 1,134 to Clinton’s 1,131. Still super close but enough for Obama to claim the most states, the most popular votes and the most delegates. That’s a big deal.
Marc Ambinder has a write-up of the bizarre Texas “primacaucus” to be held on March 4. I’ve read his write up twice and I don’t see how it could get any more complicated unless each district awarded its vote based on a game of Axis and Allies.
Washington is in a Florida state of mind… on Saturday night the Louisiana and Washington results were too close to call for much of the evening. Huckabee had creamed the newly-anointed front-runner McCain in Kansas earlier in the day and when Louisiana was called for Huckabee late in the evening, it was possible the former Arkansas governor was on his way to sweeping all three contests. As the reports of the voting from Washington trickled in, it was still too close to call. Then, when the percentage reached 87%, the reports stopped. Hours went by and no more reports came in. The next morning, the state GOP reported McCain the winner without ever reporting more than 87% of the vote. They had stopped counting.
It was damned peculiar. How they could call the winner without counting the last 13% of the vote is just nuts.
Huckabee’s lawyers were called in and have convinced the state GOP to keep counting.
With 93% of the vote now reported, McCain’s lead over Huckabee is 25.4% to 23.8% - only 1.6% separates them.
We’ll see what happens.
– Steve
Stumble it!
