AlchemyToday

Just got this in the e-mail from the Yellow Dog Dems:

Richie: Existing TDP Credentials Process Already Provides for “Verification”

Below is a statement by Texas Democratic Chairman Boyd Richie regarding the Delegate Selection Process:

The Texas Democratic Party and local Democratic Party organizations around our state are working to turn the enormous opportunity created by the record Democratic turnout experienced on March 4th into a positive outcome for Texas Democrats this fall and in 2010. We are proud of both our Presidential candidates who helped create that turnout. We ask now that the campaigns work with us rather than become an impediment to this extraordinary opportunity to build our party.

On March 4th, our Democratic precinct conventions experienced record turnout of roughly one million precinct convention attendees, a ten-fold increase from the previous high attendance mark. As expected in any record turnout involving hundreds of thousands of people, there were reports of problems caused by long lines and crowded facilities. These problems are not unique to Texas. Similar problems, in proportionately similar numbers, occurred in pure caucus states like Iowa and Nevada.

The overwhelming majority of problems reported in Texas do not affect the legitimacy of delegate allocation. It is important to remember that the precinct conventions are just the first of three steps where delegates and alternates are selected. “Final results” will not be determined until June 6-7 at the Texas Democratic State convention. And at each convention step, Texas Democratic Party rules provide a credentials process to address problems and provide an avenue to register complaints and make formal challenges

For that reason, the Texas Democratic Party will not do as suggested by one campaign and circumvent Party rules to set up an unnecessary, ad hoc “verification” process that could effectively disqualify delegates selected at their precinct conventions after the fact. The Party has never stated any intention to set up a verification process of this nature because Party rules already provide for “verification” through our credentials process. Candidates who wish to disqualify delegates must pursue formal challenges based on evidence filed appropriately in accordance with our party’s rules.

The Texas Democratic Party plans to conduct our district and county conventions on March 29 and our June State Convention in accordance with procedures set forth in Texas law and party rules. Both campaigns have the opportunity and responsibility to do their jobs by documenting evidence, filing challenges if warranted, and turning out their delegates in a system that rewards such an effort when final delegate results are determined at the State Convention in June.

These are two consistent messages out of the Clinton campaign as to why superdelegates and intelligent voters should pick her over Obama:

1. Obama has lost most big states (CA/MA/NY/TX/OH/FL/MI). Lots of electors are at stake here in November. The general is winner-take-all, so Hillary’s wins here should be worth more than the oft-marginal numbers of delegates she’s been awarded. Criticisms of this point of view: a primary win does not imply a win or even an advantage in the general election (Clinton has repeatedly made this argument about Obama’s red-state wins and it’s a good one). Relevant evidence: excepting Florida, every “big state” I’ve analyzed so far shows Obama doing as well or better than Hillary against McCain. In all states, Obama’s performance relative to Hillary’s is trending upwards.

2. Obama’s negatives will inevitably rise once the right-wing smear machine has gotten into gear. My criticisms: while you can genuinely argue whether or not Clinton’s campaign has been negative, it has undoubtedly been critical of Obama and has hit on all the notes that previous Democratic and Republican opponents of his have touched on–voters in polled states have come to know Obama through both the efforts of his campaign, his presentation in the media, and Clinton’s effort to highlight his vulnerabilities (Rezko/Chicago Seven/Poor white voters/Wright/All-talk-no-walk/etc). Obama’s performance vis-a-vis McCain has consistently improved through months of polling in every state I’ve looked at.

Here are the states I’ve compiled this morning; I’ll add California and Washington and other non-big battleground states later as well as provide the compiled polling data. First, Clinton and Obama’s match-ups vs. McCain, plotting the percentage difference between the candidates:

Next, plotting the difference between the blue and red lines in these graphs with a linear regression — a positive slope in the regression indicates that Obama’s strength against McCain, relative to Clinton, is improving.