Super Duper wrap-up

Josh Marshall sums things up, and does a far better job of it than the cable-news talking heads:

If you look at this from the vantage point of two weeks ago, it's a huge win for Obama, since he was trailing in states across the country by a very big margin. From the vantage point of the last couple days, however, it's much less clear. The hype of his momentum just got a bit out ahead of what he was able to pull off. And in that sense there's a very mild echo of New Hampshire, though the Clinton campaign is silly to claim some sort of comeback. There were a handful of states which, had he won two or more of them, would have taken him from a delegate tie to a decisive win that would have put Clinton seriously on the defensive. But it didn't happen. Not in New Jersey or Massachusetts and most importantly not in California, which Clinton won decisively.

But I think all these competing scenarios make one point clear. The only arguments for one side or the other being a winner here come down to airy and finally meaningless arguments about expectations. And the result tells a different tale. It's about delegates. It's dead even. You've got two well-funded candidates who've demonstrated an ability to power back from defeats. And neither is going anywhere.

The flip side of the proportional representation in delegates is that not only does it allow a challenger like Obama not to get put away early, it also makes it difficult to put away an opponent late. The conventional wisdom is that Obama will do well in this weekend's and next Tuesday's contests. But if he does, proportionality will reign there too. It's hard to see where this doesn't go all the way to the convention.

Indeed.

By the way, if you're looking for the Super Tuesday open thread, which I've bumped back down to its proper chronological place on the blog, here it is.

P.S. Another good wrap-up, courtesy of Matthew Yglesias:

The Obama campaign points out that their man won a majority of the states in play, which is certainly true. On the other hand, it's hard to argue that Utah, Idaho, and North Dakota are a better prize than New York and California. The bottom-line, however, is that if you factor out the more exuberant Zogby-fueled dreams of the weekend, Obama did quite well relative to his baseline of a week ago. The February 5 landscape favored Clinton, and Obama managed to not lose any of "his" states while poaching Connecticut and narrowly grabbing contested Missouri. Clinton won, but most indications are that she won't have won nearly enough delegates to put this thing out of reach. Now the landscape gets much more favorable for Obama.

This all goes back to Kos's "irrational exuberance" post. He was right.

As an aside, why does anyone even write about Zogby polls anymore? Isn't it a bit like basing weather forecasts on the Farmer's Almanac at this point?

P.P.S. Here are some more excellent observations, from TNR's Noam Scheiber, written a little earlier in the night but still essentially valid:

Obama is going to come out of tonight having won at least half of the states up for grabs, and very close to half the delegates, which either meets or exceeds the expectations for him going into today. So why do the cable pundits seem so down on him? (I actually heard Brit Hume concede that he'll probably have enough delegates to fight on after tonight. Probably?)

My sense is that this is almost entirely a function of the exit polls we in the media have been lathering ourselves in since 5:30 this evening. The polls showed Obama up in places like Massachusetts, New Jersey, Missouri, and Arizona, and many of us began to think Obama might even end the nomination fight tonight. When the actual numbers started pouring in, everyone was pretty wrong-footed.

The thing to keep in mind, though, is this: Exit polls aren't a reflection of on-the-ground reality. It's not as though Obama was actually up in all these places at 5 o'clock, and then Hillary, comeback kid that she is, reversed his charge and ground out a victory. The final results suggest he was never actually up in these places (certainly not by the margins the polls suggested.) It was a complete mirage.

Campaigns can be blamed for failing to manage expectations. But should they take the hit for the media's utter cluelessness at interpreting this data?

No. But they do. And Obama's Missouri "win" -- after the AP had called it for Clinton, then retracted the call -- came too late to reverse the P.R. damage to Obama. The die was already cast, the CW set in stone, by that point. Even though the CW itself was based on a reaction to a set of flawed, unweighted exit-poll numbers that were never discussed on-the-air. Pretty ridiculous all around.

P.P.P.S. On a more "micro" note, if I'm reading CNN's (weighted!) California exit poll correctly, African-Americans were only about 6% of the electorate!! Well, no wonder Obama lost. Sheesh. (Population-wise, California is roughly equal parts white, black and Hispanic.)

CORRECTION: That last sentence, which I've crossed out, is utterly false. I don't know where I got that idea; I thought I had read something along those lines years ago, and I swear I found something via Google last night (er, this morning) that backed it up, but I obviously must have misread it in the wee hours when I wrote this post. Anyway, I apologize for the error. California is right around 6% black, just as the turnout suggests, so the problem here was my own warped perceptions, not a low black turnout.

Comments

[Trisha]

I was utterly surprised by how early they were calling states for candidates. The polls closed here in NY at 9 pm. By 10, only 1% of the precincts were actually reporting, but they called the state for both Clinton and McCain. They subsequently won the state, but I kept thinking about what might happen if either of them hadn't won. It was far too premature to call the state, with only 1% of the votes having been counted.

[Brendan Loy]

Trisha, you may disagree with this practice, but you shouldn't really be "utterly surprised" by it; it happens in every single election. They aren't really calling the state based on 1% of the precincts reporting; they're calling it based on exit polls, supplemented by the initial data from those 1% to confirm that the exit poll isn't totally wacky. We, the public, only have access to the statewide exit poll data, but the networks' "decision desks" have that same data county-by-county, and they also have historical county data to compare the results to. So, in states where the margin is lopsided, it is often the case that, with even 1% of the precincts reporting, it is perfectly possible to validate the exit poll results and determine that the odds are 99.9% that Candidate A is going to beat Candidate B. Indeed, when a state is TOTALLY lopsided, the networks will do this based on exit polls alone, with 0% of the precincts reporting! (See: Georgia last night.) if the race is at all close, such that there's any doubt about whether the exit poll is accurate, they won't call it.

Well, except when they do, like in Missouri last night and in Florida eight years ago. Those were colossal screw-ups. But they were also screw-ups based on much more than 1% of the vote, so it just goes to show that there's no "magic number" of precincts reporting to determine when it's appropriate to "call" a race. It's a complicated art. There are situations where it's more inappropriate to "call" a state with 95% of the precincts reporting than to "call" a different state with 1% reporting. It all depends on the state in question, the closeness of the race, which precincts are reporting, how good your exit-poll data is, etc.

[Ken]

My wife and I did not stay up to watch much of the results so this morning I checked CNN and told my wife that Obama won more contests but Clinton had won the bigger ones. She asked me about the actual states and I started to go through the Obama list..starting with Delaware, Idaho, Alaska, Utah...and she interrupted me to say "Oh...Obama just won the WEIRD states." I said what about Connecticut? She said "Well that is weird too...they chose Lieberman" LOL (And yes, she is a Clinton supporter.)

[Brendan Loy]

Heh.

Missouri's not weird, though! (Oh wait... Ashcroft... nevermind. :)

[JT]

I know people like to pretend that class issues don't exist in this country, but class played as big a role in last night's election as anything. Hillary dominated the poor working class and Obama dominated the upper middle class democrats. I tend to think that the biggest divide in the democratic party is between the upper middle class self loathing idealists and the lower class people that create the base of the party. The newspaper articles are skewed in favor of Obama because the papers cater to the upper middle class readers.

[CD]

Extremely apt point JT