Hillary romps, everybody yawns

So... is it still over? Survey says... yes.

Still, Hillary won West Virginia by 41% -- about what I expected -- but, thanks to high turnout, she got an unexpectedly large raw popular vote margin: 147,410 votes, according to the current count. This increases her chances of ultimately winning an arguably plausible "popular vote" count, as it's about 40,000 more than my estimate gave her from the Mountaineer State. If she can similarly beat my estimate in Kentucky, she'll net an extra 68,000 votes or so there.

That said, her overall hopes remain slim, as they depend on surprise results in Oregon, South Dakota and Montana, and a huge victory (and turnout) in unpredictable Puerto Rico -- where, incidentally, Michelle Obama is going. And of course, the whole notion of using the "popular vote" to determine the nominee is illegitimate, and there's no way the superdelegates are going to give her the nomination over the clear pledged-delegate winner on the basis of such fuzzy math. But we're talking about the margins of plausibility here. "So you're saying there's a chance."

Anyway, Hillary already "leads" the fraudulent "count" that includes Florida and Michigan, but excludes all Obama supporters in Michigan, and excludes entirely the states of Iowa, Nevada, Maine and Washington. She's ahead by 29,471 votes in that "tally." That is, of course, not an "arguably plausible" count, as I've explained before. And it's the only count she currently leads. If you add in the estimated IA/NV/ME/WA totals, she trails by 80,751. (If you use Washington's beauty-contest primary instead of its binding caucus, she trails by 30,751.) And of course, if you give Obama the "Uncommitted" votes from Michigan, rather than giving Hillary credit for a Saddam Hussein-style 328,309 to zero "victory" in Michigan, he's way ahead. He's even further ahead if you only count the contests that, y'know, actually counted (i.e., not Florida and Michigan). But let's not get crazy, and start enforcing "rules" and whatnot. ;)

It'll be interesting to see if Hillary proclaims her popular vote "lead" today. If she does, I may write letters to her prominent superdelegate endorsers in Iowa, Nevada, Maine and Washington, arguing that they should insist on her not disenfranchising the voters of their states.

P.S. Speaking of superdelegates, the immediate result of Clinton's big win in West Virginia is... two more superdelegate endorsements for Obama. Heh.

P.P.S. TNR's Josh Patashnik makes an interesting point:

In retrospect, Barack Obama may be lucky he didn't win Indiana last week. Why? Suppose he had--there would have been immense pressure on Hillary Clinton to drop out of the race, which she might have done. Given that around seven percent of West Virginia Democratic primary voters pulled the lever for John Edwards, who dropped out of the race more than three months ago, there's a pretty decent chance Obama would have lost West Virginia, or at the very least would have come up short of 50 percent. And as bad as tonight's results look for him (even though it's yet one more instance of the essentially unchanging demography-is-destiny story in the Democratic race), surely it would have been far worse to lose to Hillary if she had already conceded the race. As it stands now, he'll be able to take his licks in West Virginia and Kentucky without being totally humiliated, then make a victory declaration of sorts after a win in Oregon. That's about as reasonable an outcome as he could have hoped for, given that the quirks of the primary calendar put two of his worst states in the union at this juncture in the race. (Random question: Oregon uses mail-in ballots, so there are no exit polls. Will the networks be able to project him the winner early enough in the night for him to make a speech at a reasonable hour?)

If, in fact, it was the antics of Rush Limbaugh that put Hillary over the top in Indiana, it may well be that El Rushbo was the only thing standing between Obama and a deeply embarrassing loss to a non-candidate. The joys of unintended consequences.

Heh.

Comments

[CORNHUSKERS 94 95 & 97]

2 more Super Delegates picked up last night for Obama.

[B. Minich]

Of course, Limbaugh is mostly concerned with chaos in the Democratic race, so I don't think he much cares. Just so long as weird stuff keeps happening.

[Ed]

It is such a typical Democrat mentality to get all caught up in a ludicrous standard of "fairness." Why on earth does a plurality of votes nationally matter when the objective has always, always, always, been delegates? I happen to be loving this unintended consequence of Gore's fatuous "legal" arguments in Florida (count these votes, but not those, votes). The fact that HRC has even a peg-leg to stand on with this vote argument is delicious to this Operation Chaos supporter.

I would absolutely love for the Dems to contravene their rules and grant HRC the relief she seeks. It would be among the greatest examples of outcome-based rule making the U.S. electorate has witnessed.

It's roost time, baby. Identity politics. Outcome-based (lack of) rule enforcement. Majority rule, not delegate (representative/republican) government. Dominance of policy by extreme/radical leftists (Soros, Kos).

McCain stood a snowball's chance in Hades prior to all this nonsense. Looks like a cold front is pushing through.

[Jim Hu]

Whether "it's over" depends on which "it" you mean:

If "it" is: Who will get the nomination - didn't you show pretty convincingly that the Dem allocation rules meant it was over at the end of February? The Dem superdelegate rules mean that this question isn't formally resolved until the vote at the convention... these commitments they're making now are not legally binding, are they? But it seems to me that nothing since before PA has changed the math.

If "it" is: are they done damaging each other and themselves? ... probably not.