It's Not Over Yet
The idea behind the new, fast-forward primary calendar that Democrats unveiled this election season was to give a big, hyperdemocratic finale to the process of picking a nominee. Nearly two dozen states, tired of standing on the sidelines as future Presidents lavished attention on places like Ottumwa, Iowa, and Nashua, N.H., had muscled their way to an early spot on the calendar. Proportional delegate allotment — instead of winner-take-all results — would ensure that every vote mattered. Super Tuesday would be the closest thing we have ever seen to a national primary: a single day on which the candidates had to prove themselves to every slice of the American electorate in states that are home to nearly half the population of the country. It was supposed to settle everything.
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It settled nothing. In a result now achingly familiar to the Democratic Party, Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama split the popular vote 50.2% to 49.8%, by a margin so thin, you could barely slide a butterfly ballot betwixt. Tuesday slipped into Wednesday without anyone knowing for sure how many delegates each candidate had captured, as provisional ballots in New Mexico were slowly tabulated by hand.
The grand plan for Super Tuesday, it turns out, depended on one candidate having superior strength, assets and popularity. Instead, the two superstar candidates and their dueling arsenals canceled each other out. Obama's greatest strength was among upscale voters, African Americans, younger people, liberals and those with college educations. He ran even with Clinton among men. Clinton drew strong support from women, older voters, Hispanics, lower-income people and those with less education. And even those gaps were shrinking, as Clinton's edge among women narrowed in some states and Obama's inroads with white voters increased.
Now the campaign that was supposed to end continues to the states that didn't join the stampede to move their primaries forward. Far from being an afterthought as just about everyone had expected, they have the power to crown the winner. And if they don't? The decision may well fall to some 800 party insiders known as super-delegates. Yes, that's right: the perverse result of all this additional democracy, in which more people than ever before will have had a voice, could be that Democrats have to turn to old-style backroom politics to select a nominee.
Rather than bringing clarity and closure, Super Tuesday left the Democratic race as confused as it has ever been. Having trailed Clinton by double digits in most Super Tuesday state polls only weeks before, Obama came away from the day's voting having won more states — 13 to her 8 — and slightly more delegates than she did. But Clinton had considerable bragging rights as well. She won California, the night's biggest prize, and a slightly larger percentage of the popular vote and took particular glee in routing Obama in Massachusetts, despite all the hoopla that had surrounded Obama's endorsement by Senator Edward Kennedy and much of his family, as well as the state's other Senator, 2004 Democratic nominee John Kerry, and Governor Deval Patrick.
Clinton strategists, perhaps wishfully, suggested that Super Tuesday may prove to be a high mark for Obama, coming as it did after a burst of good publicity surrounding his high-profile endorsements and after Clinton stumbled in South Carolina. Said one: "It's going to be hard to find a better week for him."
Indeed, they are working to make sure that is the case. The day of the primaries, the Clinton campaign announced she had agreed to participate in four debates — a format in which she has dominated — in the coming month and challenged Obama to do the same. But the Obama campaign is in no rush. "Our schedule's not going to be dictated by the Clinton campaign," said campaign manager David Plouffe.