It’s perhaps one of the weirdest arguments ever made about a nominating process, having more delegates matters less than winning the right states. The apparent claim is that when one wins a state in the primary, that makes you more likely to win it in the general election.
It’s a dumb argument because, well, the general election is a different electorate and so winning a state in a primary doesn’t mean you can carry it in the general election.
Case in point, look at the Survey USA poll of McCain-Obama, McCain-Clinton matchups.
The maps are only a snapshot in time and I’m sure they would change over an election, but Democrats take Ohio in both cases and Obama, who hasn’t even campaigned in Michigan, wins Michigan, Clinton doesn’t. That Obama makes inroads in some deeply red states is what is most interesting to me, while Clinton survives only by taking the safe Democratic states and a few swings.
He also loses New Jersey according to the survey which will only happen in bizarro world after an actual general election campaign just as Clinton isn’t going to lose Oregon and Washington.
Obama, according to the poll loses Pennsylvania and Florida–two places he hasn’t yet spent time in so this is likely to change if he does campaign in both places–or at least Pennsylvania will likely change.
The thing that makes all of this interesting is that Clinton’s only way to win the nomination is to have superdelegates vote against the plurality of the elected delegates. In one case that is reasonable if she creates popular vote margin in the contests, but if Obama wins the most popular votes and the most elected delegates, it’s hard to imagine how superdelegates would justify voting against the Democratic electorate. The only argument to even make that plausible is that Obama cannot win states like Ohio that are swing states–but the polling tells another story.
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