Electability

So here's what I don't quite get: the Clinton camp is making a lot of arguments about how Obama's wins in small states don't count for anything. They say that the only way for a candidate to prevail in the General Election is to take the big states in the primaries: California, Ohio, Pennsylvania (and, on and off, Michigan and Florida.)

But, like, that doesn't make the slightest bit of sense. In social science terms, it's what we'd call a content validity issue -- you're measuring apples against oranges. In the primaries, you've got the question of which democrat the voters prefer. And in the general election, you're measuring something totally different -- the relative frequency with which Democrats and Republicans go to the polls, and how the independents break.

So let's look at the big states that Clinton "won." First of all, this idea of winning or losing a primary is an arbitrary measure...these contests are designed to award delegates proportionally, and as we've seen, the person winning the majority of the popular vote rarely wins many more delegates than the person coming in second (in the case of Nevada, of course, Obama lost the popular vote but took the delegate majority.) And, importantly, "winning" in most of the big states has meant winning by a small majority indeed -- Clinton's wins have all been pretty close. So I think all this talk about winning and losing misses the point. For the purposes of selecting the democratic nominee, it's all about the delegates -- super and not-so. And extrapolating wins in the primary to wins in the general election just doesn't make any sense. Both of these candidates have won big in states that they could never expect to take in a general election.

What really needs to be measured, to get some sense of how the democrats might fare against McCain, is turnout. And there, they both seem to have a lot of strength. But they seem to be strong for similar reasons, since most of these people who are turning out in this election say they'd vote for either one of the candidates (less so since the Kitchen Sink method went into effect on Clinton's side.) Democrats are excited about this race, and even in the states where he lost by a relatively large margin, Obama could expect to find a huge amount of democratic support (in most of these places, remember, he got close in the polls despite having almost all of the local democratic power base supporting his rival.)

What you really need is to look at how the candidates would independently fair, state by state, against McCain. And lo, thanks to the internet, that has been done! You'll have to scroll down a bit, but you can see that in an electoral matchup, both win pretty easily. And this poll doesn't take into account likely turnout -- likely to swing democrat -- or the solidifying of the party behind a single nominee -- which, hopefully, will happen.

This election is the Democrats' to lose, in other words. And while they seem anxious to try, I'm not sure they'll manage to screw this up enough to be in real trouble. So I'm not paying any attention to the "electability" question in its current format. What I do love, though, is the way that Obama wins differently from Hillary on those maps -- with a bunch of states that I haven't seen blue in a long, long time. And I think that speaks volumes.


- JEK
Obama spoke at his med school graduation to keep a promise made when he was not a famous man, and won his heart when he picked up a hat that fell off his classmate; nominally a Democrat himself for purposes of voting in the Massachusetts primary, but with a real independent streak; not a professional pollster.