Obama’s Campaign After South Carolina and Super Tuesday

In the historic battle [S.C. primary] that pitted a black man against a white woman, the question on many minds was how black women would vote. They went overwhelmingly for Obama, in the same 8 in 10 proportion as black male voters. Nearly all the rest voted for Clinton. (Boston Globe – January 27, 2008).

We should also mention additional post-election findings produced by Exit Polls that provide us a fulsome understanding of the political and ideological issues involved in the voting results in the South Carolina. First, surprisingly White women voters gave Hillary Clinton only a plurality of their votes (42%), while giving Edwards 36% and 22% to Obama. Second, some 51% of voters said they preferred a candidate who would foster “needed change” and such voters favored Obama. Third, 75% of South Carolina voters reported to exit-pollsters that they “were ready to elect a black president”, and a similar 75% said they “were ready to elect a woman president”. When asked whether they thought American voters in general were “ready to elect a black president”, 90% said yes. Fourth, Black and White voters in South Carolina differed in their response to the question whether Obama or Clinton was the “most electable Democratic candidate”. According to the Associated Press report on exit-poll results, “two-thirds of blacks say Obama is most electable, while more whites think Clinton is most electable.” (See Boston Globe (January 27, 2008)

Interestingly enough, the “electability issue” as it relates to the relative electoral viability of Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton against several possible Republican presidential candidates, was tested in a Wall Street Journal/NBC Poll taken January 20-22 and published the day before the South Carolina primary. Surprisingly – to me anyway – when matched against four possible Republican candidates, Obama proved superior to Clinton in what the Wall Street Journal/NBC Poll characterized as a hypothetical “head-to-head matchups [of Republican candidates] with the two leading Democratic presidential candidates.” As shown in TABLE III, when matched against John McCain as of January 20-22 – just four days before the South Carolina primary – Obama ties McCain at 42% each, while Clinton loses to McCain by 2 percentage points (46% McCain; 44% Clinton).

Insofar as the results in the Super Tuesday primary elections on February 5 have put McCain clearly on a path to gain the Republican Party presidential nomination, the results of this Wall Street Journal/NBC Poll might assist Obama as his campaign for the Democratic nomination continues after Super Tuesday. The Wall Street Journal/NBC Poll is also noteworthy in regard to the finding that when matched against Republican Mike Huckabee, Obama defeats him by 55% to 33%, while Huckabee runs 8 percentage points stronger against Clinton and Clinton defeats Huckabee by 5 percentage points below Obama’s 55% victory over Huckabee.

Be this as it may, its unmistakably clear that Barack Obama’s impressive victory in the South Carolina primary placed the Obama campaign in a stronger position to contest the Democratic presidential nomination than did the previous primaries in Iowa and New Hampshire. The victory in South Carolina pump-primed the Obama campaign, so to speak—pump-primed it for the larger primary election battle that lay ahead called “Super Tuesday”.

The Meaning Of Super Tuesday For Obama’s Campaign

The results of the Democratic primary contests in 22 states on Super Tuesday – February 5th, 2008 – can only be viewed as an enormous boost to Barack Obama’s campaign for the Democratic presidential nomination. The overall aura surrounding the enormous boost that Obama’s campaign derived from Super Tuesday was captured in the summary report carried in the Boston Globe the following day. “Obama scored a coup by winning Connecticut, where Clinton had led until a few days ago. He also captured Georgia and Alabama, again beating Clinton handily among black voters, who make up about half of the electorate there. He carried his home state of Illinois, which was expected, along with Delaware, North Dakota, Utah, Minnesota, Idaho, and Kansas.”

As shown in TABLE IV, the general results in the Super Tuesday Democratic primary can be viewed as miraculous in terms of Obama’ campaign which, after all, is an up-start electoral phenomenon, a campaign challenging the best established electoral machine within the national Democratic Party – the Clinton Machine. Accordingly, the Obama campaign virtually matched the Clinton Machine in the crucial area of “votes won”, gaining 7,294,851 votes to Hillary Clinton’s 7,347,971 votes, which was only a 53,120-vote advantage for Clinton. Second, Obama’s “votes won” translated in to 13 “states won”, and this in turn translated into 839 “delegates won”, the same number of “delegates won” outcome for Clinton.

Insofar as it was the Obama campaign’s central goal to stay close to the Clinton campaign on Super Tuesday in the “delegates won” column, the results of voting on February 5th were clearly heartening for the Obama campaign. This means that the Obama campaign remains “upright-and-in-stride”, as I characterized it in my BC article on Obama.

The Exit Poll data for the Super Tuesday primary provided additional evidence to support the characterization of the Obama campaign as “upright-and-in-stride”. Perhaps the crucial evidence produced by Exit Polls was that the African-American voter bloc was solidly and overwhelmingly for Obama. As Susan Milligan, the major political reporter for the Boston Globe (February 6, 2008), reported this crucial evidence, “Early exit polls reflected what the campaigns and pollsters had concluded weeks ago: that Obama would capture an overwhelming majority of the African-American vote….” Milligan’s elaboration of the meaning of the Super Tuesday African-American vote was particularly informative: