I'm quite happy on this early sunday morning ! As soon as I woke up I jumped to cnn.com and discovered that Obama has won the Nebraska and Washington caucuses as well as the Louisiana primary !
Now that the Republican nominee will most likely be McCain (despite Huckabee's landslide victory in Kansas last night), polls can focus on which candidate between the 2 Dem opponents is most likely to beat him in November.
And the clear winner is : Obama !
In an CNN poll he would beat McCain 52% cs 44%, and a Time poll indicates he would defeat him 48% to 41%. In both cases this is out of the margin of error.
As for Clinton, she would beat McCain in the CNN poll 50% to 47%, which is inside the margin of error, but the Time poll gives a dead heat 46% each.
Clinton's key issue is that she has significantly higher negatives among the population : 44% say they don't like Clinton vs 31% only for Obama (and 36% for McCain).
However, for the time being, Clinton has more delagates than Obama, 1100 vs 1039 (estimates). Latest estimates for Super Tuesday indicate that Clinton won 582 delegates vs 562 for Obama (they are still counting because of very complicated formulas), out of the 1681 that were at stake that day.
There's now a frightening possibility that both candidates get short of the necessary 2025 delegates to secure the nomination. In that case, the responsbility would then fall to the 800 party "superdelegates" who can cast ballots for the candidate of their choice.
This obviously wouldn't be good at all : the more divided the party, the more likely it is to lose in November.
Additional issue, a financial one : the longer Clinton and Obama fight, the more costly it will be, the less money there will be for the final race.
According to the latest news ( realclearpolitics.com ) it seems that the latests successes of Obama reduces the gap in the delegates race : 1198 delegates for Obama while Hillary is at 1121 !
Posted by: mathias | February 10, 2008 at 06:38 PM
At this very moment (sunday 7:41PM) on realclearpolitics.com, 1123 for Clinton & 1120 for Obama !
Posted by: Michel de Guilhermier | February 10, 2008 at 07:42 PM
This was a fantastic and historic win for Barack Obama and our country! I believe he will do a great deal to attempt to unite this country!
Posted by: Obama Fan | November 07, 2008 at 08:10 PM