Showing posts with label women voters. Show all posts
Showing posts with label women voters. Show all posts

May 07, 2008

Candidate Strategies after North Carolina and Indiana

After the American Century

The pre-election predictions I posted on Monday were so accurate that you can go back and read it now as a report of what happened. Obama did win North Carolina by a wide margin, and he did make it quite close in Indiana. Each did well where I predicted they would. The results can be read in several ways.

1. Obama's lead in delegates has increased again, because North Carolina has more of them to give him, and he won it by more than 14 points. He will likely get close to the same number of delegates as Hillary in Indiana. On the whole, he has come out of the election better than many expected after all the media hype about Rev. Wright.

2. Hillary will stay in the race, she announced, even though the New York Times reports that her campaign is broke again. Since there is a ceiling on how much any individual can give a candidate, she will need to find some new donors. This is not easy for her now.

3. While the results in the two states differ, the pattern is the same. Black voters are 90% for Obama. He also wins all the large urban areas, often by margins of 20-30%. But Hillary wins by equal margins in rural areas. She attracts poor whites, the less educated. old people, pensioners, and women. Barack continues to win decisively among the most support from the young, the educated, and those who make higher incomes. It's McDonalds vs. Starbucks.

What does this mean for the immediate future - the West Virginia primary? It will likely be a strong win for Hillary on May 13. Look at the counties that are most like West Virginia in rural North Carolina. She won them by huge margins. The same is true for the Ohio counties just across the Ohio River from West Virginia. There are few Black people in Appalachia, where plantation slavery never existed, and it is not exactly a highly educated state either. I once spent some days in its back country riding around in a jeep with a vet, Doc Weiner. He was very popular up i the hills and hollows as he made his rounds, mostly to treat dogs and horses. I heard several people ask him if he would treat their children as well. (He would not. ) Doc Weiner told me that often a man did not call a physician if one of the (usually many) children got sick, but he always called his office if a hunting dog fell ill. Admittedly this was years ago, and possibly the Internet and globalization has transformed the people I saw then, but I doubt it. These are mountain people in a poor state. This is not Obama-land.

So expect Hillary to proclaim herself the underdog, battling against tremendous odds. She has been comparing herself to Rocky Balboa of late. Expect her to keep on talking about her bogus plan for tax-relief on gasoline (see my earlier blog on this). Expect her to trumpet her poverty - shucks, she's down on her luck just like those mountaineers - and to keep painting Obama (poor family, single mother) as an elitist who is out of touch with the ordinary people like herself. It is astonishing to see how she has managed to bury her own elite education at Wellsley and Yale, not to mention her personal fortune.

What will Obama do? He probably will not campaign too hard in West Virginia, but spend time wooing the super-delegates, make a major speech attacking John McCain, and focus on the two primaries on May 20. As usual, he has been better at raising money and more disciplined in using it than Hillary, so he can afford to go all out for the primaries in Kentucky and Oregon. In short, his best strategy is probably to campaign in West Virginia just enough to pin Hillary down, spending money she does not have, while making sure he wins in the following week. It is not over yet, her chances are dwindling, but anything can happen in American politics.

March 23, 2008

Preparing the Way

Weedcraft artwork, by Fern Nye
After the American Century

On this Easter Morning I want to wish all my readers well, and say Thank You for your attention. The pace of publication has been slow of late because of the final illness of my mother, Fern, who passed away last week. She was one of my readers. Rather, beginning in childhood, she was my first reader. She also took a keen interest in politics, worked to get out the vote, and once was elected a Justice of the Peace. Even in her last days, she was following the current election with great interest. Always a swing voter, she studied the candidates closely. She was a liberal Republican who admired both Abraham Lincoln and Jimmy Carter, both Dwight Eisenhower and Martin Luther King.

Barack Obama made what is already a famous speech last week, but unfortunately my mother never got to hear it. The media keeps referring to it as a speech about "race", but it would be more accurate to say that it is about getting beyond racial fears and stereotyping. By giving it in Philadelphia he called attention to the continuity between his campaign and the promises and possibilities of the Constitution that was written in that city 221 years ago. It is a great speech because it is not mere rhetorical effects, but a probing analysis of the attitudes of both African-Americans and White Americans. So many have already commented on what he said, that I will only say that it reminds Americans of all racial and religious backgrounds that we are on a journey together, sharing a common fate, building a common future.

I feel certain that my mother would have liked that speech. In her own way, she was part of the process of change that Obama embodies and embraces. In the late 1950s, also in Pennsylvania, at the height of the Civil Rights Movement, she strongly supported hiring a Black clergyman in her largely white Episcopal congregation. He was hired, and proved to be an effective and popular minister. For the most part, Fern Nye was not a public figure, working quietly and generously for others through volunteer work and charitable giving.

Nevertheless, she acknowledged that, while she knew as a trained biologist that racial differences were so minimal as to be unimportant, she still discovered racist feelings within herself. For example, she once confessed to me (c. 1964) that when taking communion, sharing the same cup of wine with a Black person as it was passed from mouth to mouth, bothered her, even though intellectually she knew it should not. Her honesty about such matters helped her to transcend these feelings. She did not let herself become a prisoner of prejudice but continued to develop on many levels until the end of her life. She was considering whether or not to vote for Obama. That would have been inconceivable when she first was old enough to vote in 1941.

On this Easter Day I honor Fern Nye and the journey she made. Like many in her generation, she became more open and tolerant with the years. If we can now believe that "Yes, We Can," it is because people like her prepared the way.

January 09, 2008

Hillary Beats Obama, Just!

I was wrong, and so was everyone else who believed the polls. I looked at them all, and as of two days ago, Obama was widening his lead. But something happened in the two or three days since those polls and the actual election. Clinton got far more support from women than the polls had predicted - they said women would split between the two. In fact, she got 14% more, showing that when women go into the polling booth they are still thinking about their decision. This was decisive, as Hillary defeated him by only two percentage points - 39% to 37%. Obama was also perhaps a victim of his anticipated success, as Independant voters, who can participate in either primary, seem to have gone over to help McCain, because Obama apparently was going to win without their help. Had the polls showed Obama in a close race, then more Independents might have supported him.

Voters clearly were volatile in New Hampshire, and the process of the election brought more energy to Hillary's campaign. This surprised all the pundits, who admitted it on CNN and in the other media. In the last two days Hillary became more populist in tone and more open to questions from the crowds who came to hear her. Until this week, she gave few interviews and the communication was all one way. She also teared up in an emotional moment surrounded by women in a small public meeting. That moment was caught on TV and rebroadcast many times. (This seems to have worked once, but how many times could she become emotional before it would begin to hurt her?) She was learning from what worked for other candidates, and that is as it should be. The primary process gives candidates a chance to know the public and find out what they care about. She refocused on younger voters, as Obama has, making a point to pose many of them behind her on the stage. In her victory speech Hillary sounded a bit like Edwards, speaking about the "invisible Americans" and the hard-working people who cannot afford to pay the bills. She has also begun to attack the oil companies, the pharmeceutical companies, and the insurance companies, which may win the primary for her, but may alienate swing voters and can stimulate these companies to give more money to Republicans. Overall, Clinton presented her self as more emotional, and won over many to the cause at the last minute.

Now we have an open race, with two candidates almost equally strong in the North, and Edwards hoping for a comeback in the South. So far, the campaign has not tested the candidates' appeal in large cities or among Black and Hispanic voters. The next primary in Michigan will be the first in a large, urban, and multicultural state. Can Hillary appeal to that audience as well as Obama will?  Can she continue to outpoll him among women voters? 

On the Republican side, McCain made a tremendous comeback, defeating Romney, who has now come in second twice. But that race is still wide open, as it rolls on toward Michigan. Romney's father was governor of Michigan, after all, so he has one more chance to win a primary. But if he cannot win there, then it may come down to a race between McCain and Huckabee and perhaps Giuliani, with Fred Thompson as a remote outside possibility.