Horse Race

My gut tells me this thing is over and has been since Super Tuesday I. That day Obama one some critical states. I don't have time to pour over results as much as I would like to. (Really, I would) But, Kos has and here are his predictions for today. (Kos and his site are pretty smart they know where to look for information, they have a good filter, and don't sugar coat bad news)

I have to use simpler, quickly digested data for my gut. If you look at the NYT map of the results you can deduce a few trends or patterns. First of all there is obvious regionalism - each candidate wins their areas which means both are viable candidates. (Edwards in 2008 couldn't win South Carolina and Gore in 2000 couldn't win Tennessee!) Next there seems to be a North/South divide which I might attribute to block Hispanic voting largely for Hillary, and of course powerful block African American voting for Barak which gave him the south. Finally, I was really surprised by states like Connecticut, Idaho and Minnesota on February 5th. Obviously I don't know the particulars of each battle ground and those are probably much more important than the thumbsucking that follows - but here it goes:

I think there was a national democratic orthodoxy on February 5th that Clinton would be the inevitable nominee. The large states such as California (and Texas if they could have voted on Feb 5th I'm convinced) voted this orthodoxy. The Democrats of the other states who are always voting in the shadow of the blue powerhouses such as NY and CA were more open to the underdog challenger. Thus you got the crazy results such as Obama getting an even higher percentage in Minnesota than in Illinois. And Idaho? 80% Barak? Even with caucuses which tend to skew numbers more than primaries this seems to be a huge number.

So what happens going forward? Obviously the route is already on. For both altruistic (let the voters decide) and self interested (ratings) reasons I believe that the medias have down-played this domination. Again, I haven't done the delegate number-crunching - but have heard that Hillary has to will by 20 points in Texas to jump start her campaign. I wouldn't be surprised if she pulls a "New Hampshire" and wins in Texas by a few points - especially with the support of Rush Limbaugh supporters who want Hillary to win and will cross over to help drag on the fight. But I think the route continues - Barak now has the O-mentum (I made this up but was I the first? I'm sure of the 7 billion others out there someone else beat me to it) (How can you beat Joe-mentum though?) I'm guessing he will win both Ohio and Texas and hopefully then we can finally move on to the final step of this oh-too-long process.