Senator Clinton's solid victory over Senator Obama in the West Virginia primary was great news for the democratic party(the voters) and for Clinton's ability to connect with the voters even though she was written off by the news media and pundits.
The latest poll that came out prior to the vote showed that 64% of democrats wanted Senator Clinton to stay in the race. The voters in West Virginia confirmed that. Senator Clinton's support across the various sections of the american voter has been truly amazing. Her base is much broader than Obama's and would have the better chance to unite the voters in the general election. It is telling when the leading candidate looses by such a large margin (41%) this late in the game, especially when he and his campaign has already crowned him the democratic nominee. And it has happened when Obama had just announced he would begin to campaign in those swing states he lost to Clinton. Re: Michigan, Florida, Pennsylvania, Ohio and Texas.
Senator Clinton's decision not give in to her detractors reflect her courage, resolve and willingness to fight for what she believes in. Her message of talking about the real issues facing America are in contrast with Obama and McCain's campaign. Obama still has not articulated what changes he is for and McCain touts a second hand version of Bush.
Kentucky and Oregon primaries are next week and all primaries will officially end soon after that. The delegates who will cast the final votes and select the next nominee should think hard about who is best to represent the democratic party in the November elections. The pundits and news media have chosen Obama long ago and have rejected any idea of fairness or what is best for the country. This despite the fact that this primary season has brought out the best in the democratic party, the voters. The democratic primaries have been a model for years to come had it not been for the media and the pundits who clamored to end it all long ago.
Regardless who ends up being the democratic nominee, the media and pundits will forever tell the people why it happened. But the fact of the matter is we have an electorate who believes in both candidates ability and the final voting results will be so close, it will tell the story itself. And when the democratic nominee is officially know it will be up to that candidate to carry the party to victory in November, there will no longer be a blame game on someone else. The nominee will have to make his/her case to the american people.
6 comments :
The people of W.Virginia with their vote showed why Clinton was right to stay in this race. We are a better country because of her determination to go on despite all the negative reporting by the news media and I am afraid it is going to get more nasty by them the closer we get to the end of the primaries. I would never cast my vote for any politician who would want to short circuit the primaries before it is over. What is there to be afraid of?
West Virginia is 97% white, 100% redneck and the least educated state in America. Congratulations to Senator Clinton for winning trailer park, USA. Unfortunately, if ANYONE thinks a Democrat can win this state in November, they're sadly mistaken.
FWIW, Obama will have more than enough delegates after June 3rd to put him over the top. Clinton will win Kentucky big and lose Oregon by double digits. After the voting is complete on Tuesday, Obama will have won more delegates on the day than Clinton.
Clinton cannot catch Obama in popular vote, delegates won or states won. Please tell us what exactly she would base her argument on for having the Super Delegates overturn the American voters who have nominated Obama!!!!
Consider this: The Super Delegates certainly will. Here's an excellent article from the New York Times (which earlier endorsed Senator Clinton) talking about how Barack Obama might actually put an end to the GOP "Southern Strategy".
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In the South, a Force to Challenge the G.O.P.
By ADAM NOSSITER and JANNY SCOTT
Published: May 16, 2008
NEW ORLEANS — The sharp surge in black turnout that Senator Barack Obama has helped to generate in recent primaries and Congressional races could signal a threat this fall to the longtime Republican dominance of the South, according to politicians and voting experts.
Should Mr. Obama become the Democratic nominee, he would still have to struggle for white swing voters in the South and in border states like West Virginia, where he lost decisively to Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton in Tuesday’s presidential primary. In West Virginia, where more than three-fourths of white voters chose Mrs. Clinton, 20 percent of the white voters said the race of the candidate mattered in their choice.
But in Southern states with large black populations, like Alabama, Mississippi and Virginia, an energized black electorate could create a countervailing force, particularly if conservative white voters choose not to flock to Senator John McCain, the presumptive Republican nominee. Merle Black, a political scientist at Emory University in Atlanta, predicts “the largest black turnout in the history of the United States” this fall if Mr. Obama is the nominee.
To hold these states, Republicans may have to work harder than ever. Already, turnout in Democratic primaries this year has substantially exceeded Republican turnout in states like Arkansas, Louisiana, South Carolina, Tennessee and Virginia.
Some analysts suggest that North Carolina and Virginia may even be within reach for the Democratic nominee, and they point to the surprising result in a Congressional special election in Mississippi this week as an indicator of things to come.
With the strong support of black voters, a conservative white Democrat, Travis W. Childers, scored an upset victory in that race, in a district held by Republicans since 1995. Kelvin Buck, a black state representative who helped the Childers campaign, said he saw a “level of enthusiasm and energy” that he had not seen before from black voters — significantly motivated, he said, by a recent Republican anti-Obama campaign.
The numbers appear to bear that out. In one black precinct in the town of Amory, Miss., the number of voters nearly doubled, to 413, from the Congressional election in 2006, and this for a special election with nothing else on the ballot. Meanwhile, in a nearby white precinct, the number of voters dropped by nearly half.
A similar increase has been evident in Southern states with presidential primaries this year. In South Carolina, the black vote in the primary more than doubled from 2004, to 295,000, according to exit poll estimates. In Georgia, it rose to 536,000 from 289,000.
One expert on African-American politics, David A. Bositis of the Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies, called those numbers “almost astounding.” Black turnout also shot up in states like Maryland, Virginia and Louisiana, even after Hurricane Katrina had driven many Louisianians out of state.
Larry J. Sabato, director of the Center for Politics at the University of Virginia, said: “This is going to encourage the purplization of red states. It’s going to make red states purplish over time.”
Black voters made up a larger percentage of Democratic primary voters this year in several states than in the last two presidential election years, according to exit polls conducted by Edison/Mitofsky for the National Election Pool of television networks and The Associated Press this year and in 2004, and by the Voter News Service in 2000. In Maryland, for example, black voters rose to 47 percent of the total, up from 35 percent in 2004 and 28 percent in 2000.
Ronald W. Walters, a professor of government and politics at the University of Maryland, who worked for the 1984 presidential campaign of the Rev. Jesse Jackson, said of Mr. Obama, “He’s generated a tremendous force in American political culture outside the electoral system.”
Still, it would take a shift in the electoral dynamic — a substantial stumble by John McCain, for instance — for Mr. Obama to put in play a state like Mississippi, where whites gave John Kerry only about 15 percent of their vote in 2004 and where voting in presidential elections is perhaps more racially polarized than anywhere else in the nation. Even with a heavy black turnout, Mr. Bositis estimated, Mr. Obama would have to increase his white percentage by at least a third, to about 20 percent, to win the state.
“I don’t anticipate him winning Mississippi,” Mr. Bositis said, even though it has a higher percentage of blacks than any other state, 36 percent.
Many of the votes on Tuesday for Mr. Childers — an anti-abortion, pro-gun-rights Democrat — were from whites who will in all likelihood pull the lever for Mr. McCain in November, analysts and voters themselves say.
“Obama, he’s too off-the-wall,” said Chappell Sides, a white Republican-leaning voter in Yalobusha County who said he was preparing to punch the button for Mr. Childers on Tuesday. “Hillary — I thought I hated her, till Obama came along.”
Bruce Oppenheimer, a political scientist at Vanderbilt University, said the question was not so much whether Mr. Obama would carry Mississippi as whether he would force Republicans to spend time and money in the state.
Yet one sure lesson of the surprising Congressional result from northern Mississippi is that the use of Mr. Obama as an electoral tactic — Republicans resorted to it heavily in the contest — is at best a double-edged sword. At worst it is a guillotine for Republican candidates in areas with substantial black populations, like the Mississippi district won by Mr. Childers, where 26 percent are African-American. Indeed, Tuesday’s Mississippi vote emerged as a case study in the effects and consequences of focusing on Mr. Obama.
“We realized the Republican machine was on the attack,” said Mr. Buck, the state representative who helped Mr. Childers. “They wanted to say he was tied to Barack Obama. The question we asked was, What’s wrong with that? We wanted to prove to them that there’s nothing wrong in Mississippi with a person being tied to Barack Obama.”
Between an initial vote on April 22, when Mr. Childers fell just shy of getting the 50 percent he needed to win, and Tuesday’s runoff election, when he won with a decisive 54 percent, the Republican campaign to link Mr. Childers with Mr. Obama intensified, with a barrage of advertisements specifically on that theme. Perhaps not coincidentally, vote totals in counties with large black populations went up sharply between those two dates. In Marshall County, which is 48.8 percent black, the votes nearly doubled, to 5,083. In Clay County, 56.8 black, nearly 1,500 more people voted, pushing the total to 3,898.
The attacks on Mr. Obama clearly had a galvanizing effect, local officials said. “The people I talked to said, ‘Man, I don’t like that they’re trying to use Obama against him,’ ” said Eric Powell, a black state senator who helped in voter turnout efforts. “It actually helped Travis.”
The special election in Mississippi that elected a democrat does not signal Miss. in the Democratic column in November. That was a district election and not a state wide election where whites are the majority. There is really no evidence that Obama can break the hold of the republican party in the South.
Argo said...
The special election in Mississippi that elected a democrat does not signal Miss. in the Democratic column in November. That was a district election and not a state wide election where whites are the majority. There is really no evidence that Obama can break the hold of the republican party in the South.
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It doesn't mean a win but it puts it in play and with the large increase in black voter participation (up to 162% more than 2006), it bodes well for Democrats across the nation. One thing Obama on the ticket does is put an end to the Republican "Southern strategy" and makes them have to actually campaign and spend time and money in the deep south instead of taking them for granted. Every day and dollar spent in the south by the Republicans is a plus for the Democrats, win, lose or draw. They can't win without a solid south!!
Per MSNBC.com 5/20/08 ...Nationally, Obama holds his largest lead yet over Clinton in the Gallup Poll, 55 percent to her 39 percent. The poll, released Monday, was conducted among 1,261 Democratic voters and has a 3 percentage point margin of error. Back in mid-January, Clinton held a 20 percentage point lead in the Gallup Poll...."
But, according to Clinton and her supporters, "It's not Over." -(sigh)
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