AmPol: Potomac Primaries, People Please Prepare Pickled Peppers

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Obama has the momentum

AFTER fighting Hillary Clinton to a draw on Super Tuesday, Barack Obama might now feel that he is on a roll. Over the weekend he racked up four more states—to Mrs Clinton’s none—and he looks set to pick up more on Tuesday February 12th. Mr Obama’s train is picking up speed.

The states that voted at the weekend were as different as they could be. Maine in the north-east combines blue-blooded coastal money (George Bush’s parents live there) with poorer farming and factory communities in the interior. Louisiana is a southern state where blacks make up a big chunk of the Democratic primary electorate. Washington state in the north-west is famous for its progressive politics. And Nebraska, smack in the middle of the country, is lily-white corn-farming country like Iowa, the first state to go for Mr Obama in 2008.

All plumped for Mr Obama on Saturday and Sunday. He won 57-36 in Louisiana, which held a traditional primary, a striking result for Mr Obama. In Maine (a 60-40 victory), Washington and Nebraska (victories by 36 and 35 percentage points respectively) the contest was in the form of a caucus. These victories, while also impressive, were less surprising: his strong organisation and the enthusiasm of his followers help him to perform well in the caucus format, where getting voters to turn out for a long meeting is perhaps the biggest challenge.

Mrs Clinton’s campaign, unsurprisingly, played down the results, pointing to Mr Obama’s bigger efforts in those states. But he is also expected to do well in the “Potomac primary” on Tuesday, when votes are held in the adjacent states of Virginia and Maryland, as well as Washington, DC (which lies between them). The demographics look favourable to him, as do polls (although they show some widely different results, and Mrs Clinton should not be counted out).

Mrs Clinton is acting sanguine; she has won most of the biggest states so far (New York, California, Massachusetts, New Jersey), and likes her chances in two more, Ohio and Texas, on March 4th. The campaign, however, has shown signs of strain: late in January she was forced to lend her campaign $5m (although she quickly recouped it in a strong fundraising week). And on Sunday afternoon her campaign manager, Patti Solis Doyle, stepped down. The campaign denied that this was a shake-up, citing the long campaign’s tolls on staff members’ families.

As both campaigns survey the remaining states to vote, an ugly possibility hoves into view. It may well be that neither candidate is able to win enough so-called “pledged” delegates in the state primaries to secure the nomination. Such delegates, once chosen by primaries, must vote for the candidate they are pledged to at the August nominating convention. But if neither candidate wins a majority of them, the “superdelegates” then act as tie-breakers. Superdelegates are the country’s Democratic governors, Democratic members of Congress, and high-ranking party members of the Democratic Party. They can, in theory, lend their support to anyone they choose at this summer’s convention. But some have been making promises, and more to Mrs Clinton than to Mr Obama.

Mr Obama will be ahead in pledged delegates by the end of this week by most counts. (The counts differ because some pledged delegates have not yet been chosen officially.) But Mrs Clinton has an edge when the superdelegates are added in. This raises the spectre of a long, difficult and expensive campaign in which Mr Obama may win among those delegates chosen by the voters, but the superdelegates put Mrs Clinton over the top. Many Democrats—especially the numerous first-time younger voters (mostly supporters of Mr Obama)—would wonder what the whole primary process was for.

The Obama camp is saying that the superdelegates should follow the will of the people. The Clinton group responds that this eliminates the point of having the superdelegates at all. The superdelegates were instituted in 1982 to give insiders more control over a party that had begun to drift too close (in their view) to the hands of ordinary activists. Perhaps the superdelegates will indeed obey the will of the people, siding with the winner in pledged delegates whatever their earlier promises. After all, the Democratic Party was traumatised by what many feel was an election stolen by George Bush in 2000. It would be odd indeed for something looking similar to happen in the party’s own choice of a candidate this year.

Alliteration ++