Enforced narratives: Who will win the big states, and what happens when people find out who Obama is?
March 17th, 2008These 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.
