Hillary went from enjoying near royalty status as a former First Lady, campaigning with Bill, a two-term former President, with a powerful machine behind her to fighting for an asterisk next to a bogus popular vote total in a delegate battle she lost. Her campaign isn't giving up.
Ken Vogel reports that the Clinton campaign is using the results to openly argue that Barack Obama has a problem with Hispanic voters – an idea Clinton backers have previously only behind the scenes.
“It was a 100 percent Hispanic primary and it shows that he has a problem with the Latino community,” Terry McAuliffe, campaign chairman for Hillary Clinton, told a handful of reporters after polls closed Sunday. “He cannot close in this key core constituency,” McAuliffe added.
Voters in Puerto Rico are in some ways different from Hispanics living stateside, both because there’s a long tradition of racial mixing and because elections here tend to center around the debate over whether the island should remain a commonwealth or become a state or an independent nation. They also don't vote in November.
Clinton has fared better than Obama with Hispanic voters in previous primaries. And her campaign has argued to superdelegates that she’d do better than Obama against presumptive GOP nominee in key states with large Hispanic populations.
CNN exit polls in Puerto Rico found a surprisingly high 31 percent of voters admitted the race of the candidates was important in their decision. Of those, 63 percent voted for Clinton and 37 percent for Obama.
“It helps make the case that we would not have to expend resources to win a natural Democratic constituency,” said Puerto Rico Senate president Kenneth D. McClintock, a Clinton co-chair and superdelegate. If Obama is the nominee, McClintock asserted that in order to win the Hispanic vote, Democrats “would have to divert resources that we would otherwise spend on other campaigns.”
But McAuliffe’s assertion Sunday that Obama has a Hispanic “problem” was more direct than any the campaign has made publicly to date.
In a conference call with Clinton campaign donors last month, the campaign’s liaison to superdelegates, Harold Ickes, asserted McCain has “very favorable standing with Hispanics because of his position on the immigration bill.”
linkContrast this to what Obama had to say about Hillary winning the PR primary:
"I just got off the phone with Sen. Clinton. She's gonna win Puerto Rico and I wanted to congratulate her for that," he said, before going on to praise the New York senator, saying the party would be unified for the general election and that she would be "a great asset when we go into November to make sure that we defeat the Republicans, that I can promise you."
linkDelegates Obama needs to win: 47
Up for grabs after PR:
31 pledged delegates
204 super delegates
Flashback from the day after Super Tuesday. How Obama destroyed the Clinton machine and the Hillary's inevitability:
February 06, 2008 - 09:46 AM | by Brian Young
Momentum is one of the most overrated aspects of contests. That’s not to say it doesn’t exist; it does. But the importance of it is continually overstated in all aspects of competition, from sports to politics.
There’s a saying in baseball: momentum is only as good as the next day’s starting pitcher. You may have won 6 straight and feel like you are on a roll, but you’re throwing out a chump starter against Josh Beckett, you don’t have momentum going into the next day. That’s just reality.
So it is with politics. Momentum is real. When you win, people talk about you in good ways, which exposes the best of your message to more people, which creates excitement, etc, etc. But it’s only as good as the next contest. If you are fundamentally behind in that next contest, you may not be able to catch up, and your “momentum” suddenly seems to disappear. But that’s just because it wasn’t nearly as strong a force as people thought it was.
Which brings us to this primary season. The chaotic nature of this primary season isn’t really chaotic at all. The beginning of this primary season went across states where each of the two Democratic candidates had clear advantages. Obama had a great Iowa organization, and he was from neighboring Illinois. Clinton had a massive well of support in New Hampshire and the support of the Shaheen machine. Clinton had support from the institutional party in Nevada plus a deep well of support among Hispanics. Obama had the overwhelming support of the African-American community in South Carolina. Sure, hindsight is 20-20, and the NH and NV races were very close, but the fundamentals in each race favored the eventual winner.
But last night, Barack Obama broke that trend. He began to play on Hillary Clinton’s side of the field.
It showed in some individual states, mostly MO, DE, CT, and NM (no matter who wins the final vote in NM by a hundred or two). But, more globally, February 5th, by luck or design, was Clinton’s day. The makeup of the primaries and caucuses was almost perfectly designed for her. You had the machine states of the northeast in NJ, MA, and NH; a neighboring state of CT that gets much of its media from NY; a clump of states bordering Arkansas; the Hispanic-rich Southwest; and then some caucuses sprinkled elsewhere. Caucuses are supposed to put a premium on organization and networks (and they do), and the clear belief among most observers was that Clinton would have the strongest organization by far. And all of the other states are right, smack-dab in the middle of Clinton’s demographic or geographic wheelhouse.
This was supposed to be coronation day. But something happened on the way to the coronation.
Barack Obama grew an organization that dominated the caucus states. He put pressure on Clinton in the northeast, even picking off CT and DE. He poached the largest of the border states in MO. And he fought her to standstill in the southwestern state of New Mexico. He didn’t completely collapse her bulwark with wins in NJ, MA, and CA, but that would’ve been the end of things if he had. Clinton still has a strong campaign, so that was very unlikely.
But Barack Obama’s is now stronger. He has crossed the 50-yard line and started to take the fight to Clinton. Now, with a string of states more friendly to him (caucuses this weekend, VA-MD-DC next week), he can begin to wear down the Clinton campaign. He has a larger activist organization by far, and he is beginning to put some distance between them in the money race as well. And he’s gaining mind-share all the time among the American people.
Now the terrain is much more friendly for Obama. The states are better for him, and he’s starting to assert some control. This is a tough, hard-fought campaign between two heavyweights, so the normal narrative of momentum and collapse just doesn’t fit. It’s all about the slow establishment of control, and right now, Obama is moving forward much more than Clinton.
Meanwhile, Obama did the unthinkable, trouncing Clinton's money edge by energizing an unusually large base of core supporters. To put his records in perspective, consider Tuesday's primary electorate. The candidates split about 14.6 million voters in 22 states. Obama's donors equal a striking 9 percent of his Super Tuesday turnout. Add the non-donor supporters that Obama has engaged, from office volunteers and decentralized phone bankers to the unprecedented 1.13 million people publicly declaring their endorsements on social networking sites, and over one out of ten Obama voters are essentially activists. That is a historic development for a presidential campaign. It means that a large share of Obama's base will not merely vote for him once, but repeatedly devote time, money, social capital and personal credibility to back his candidacy.
linkedited title and for clarity.
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