USA Today: Super delegates' choice may hinge on electability
By Jill Lawrence, USA TODAY
WASHINGTON — Barack Obama says he's won more states, Hillary Rodham Clinton says she's won bigger states, and both say their primary-season performance makes them the more electable Democratic presidential nominee. The relative strength of their arguments could influence decisions made by hundreds of super delegates, the party leaders and elected officials likely to determine who tops the Democratic ticket. Students of the nomination process say the results so far tell little. "It's always very dubious to say somebody winning a primary or caucus will end up necessarily winning a general election," says Andrew Dowdle, a political scientist at the University of Arkansas. Historian Eric Rauchway of the University of California, Davis, says, "There's no correlation at all between your performance in primaries and your performance in a general election."
That hasn't stopped both sides from trying to persuade voters and the super delegates that they're playing the best hand. Top spokesmen for Obama and Clinton faced off Sunday on NBC's Meet the Press. "There is no question that Barack can win nationwide," said former Senate Democratic leader Tom Daschle. "We're going to win big states, small states. It doesn't matter who's at the top of the ticket, I think the Democrat's going to be in a very commanding position in New York and California, and I think we can even put Texas in play." Pennsylvania Gov. Ed Rendell said Clinton has won states with about 260 electoral votes compared with 190 for Obama. "The big four in any presidential election recently are Pennsylvania, Ohio, Florida and Michigan. … She's clearly the strongest candidate in the states that Democrats must win to have a chance," he said....
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"He's got good arguments to make, and she's got good arguments to make. It's very subjective," says Bill Carrick, a Los Angeles-based Democratic consultant who is neutral in the race.
Super delegates look at tangible factors such as the pledged delegate count earned in primaries and caucuses, and intangibles such as momentum. They also look at where the candidates are winning and how they are winning.
In contests so far, black voters gave Obama 80% or more of their votes while Clinton picked up most of the Hispanic voters. Obama has staged occasional takeovers of Clinton pillars such as lower-income voters, less educated voters and white women, for instance in Wisconsin and Virginia. In Ohio, Clinton loosened Obama's grip on affluent voters, college graduates and independents — running even with him among those groups....
Several national polls show Obama beating Arizona Sen. John McCain, the presumptive Republican nominee, by bigger margins than Clinton. The only hint of how each might fare against McCain state by state, the way a general election works, comes from SurveyUSA, a non-partisan polling firm, which last week released polls of 600 registered voters in each of the 50 states. The bottom line: Both Obama and Clinton would get the 270 electoral votes needed to win the presidency, but by different paths. Obama would win 24 states with 280 electoral votes, to 256 electoral votes in 26 states for McCain. Clinton would win 20 states with 276 electoral votes, to 262 electoral votes in 30 states for McCain.
http://www.usatoday.com/news/politics/election2008/2008-03-09-electable_N.htm
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