Last night, John McCain finally racked up enough delegates to secure the Republican nomination.
Neither of the Democratic candidates had such luck.
It was, of course, a fantastic night for Senator Hillary Clinton, who defied all expectations to win Texas and Ohio. But unfortunately for Hillary, the numbers are still against her.
After all the dust had settled, Hillary's victories in Ohio and Texas still left her over a hundred delegates short of overcoming Obama's commanding lead.
Hillary needed to win Ohio and Texas by huge margins in order to close the gap; ultimately, her margins just weren't big enough. Hillary's ten-point victory in Ohio was respectable enough, if not quite as impressive as the near 20-point victories Obama had earned in February, but her slim three-point lead in Texas was too weak to dent Obama's presidential prospects.
Now, both campaigns will be forced to dig in for a grueling, prolonged struggle that will come to a head in the April 22nd Pennsylvania primary.
Which candidate will benefit from this brutal, political trench-warfare?
Barack H. Obama.
As last night's final delegate tallies clearly showed, the lead Obama gained in February is going to be hard to beat. All Obama has to do from here on out is make sure most of the upcoming races are close, and his roughly 100 delegate lead will cushion him to a narrow victory. If Obama wins a fair amount of the upcoming contests, with decent margins, it will all be icing on his cake of electoral hope.
That is, unless the superdelegates decide to shake things up. Even if Obama retains his pledged-delegate lead at the end of all the primary contests, he still won't have the 2,025 delegates needed to completely secure the nomination. While most people expect the majority of superdelegates to side with the candidate who wins the overall popular vote, anything could potentially happen, especially if Obama's pledged-delegate lead becomes razor-thin.
However, the superdelegate factor could presumably work in Obama's favor. Party insiders tend to consider electability the paramount quality when selecting presidential candidates, and Obama is the only Democratic candidate who consistently beats John McCain in national polls. Hillary will need to improve her national standing against John McCain if she wants the superdelegates to throw their support behind her at the convention.
Why it Happened. (Probably)
Early this morning, The Politico's headline flaunted the conventional interpretation of last night's results:
"Clinton's Lesson: Attacking Obama Works".
Hillary Clinton's increasingly intense attacks on Obama may have had some impact on the election results, but let's be honest here: some of her attacks were pretty lame. Unless the residents of Ohio and Texas have a collective IQ of 42, I highly doubt that Hillary's laughable, oft-mocked "red phone" ad, and similar attacks, really tapped into the psyche of the voters in Tuesday's primaries.
Maybe they were simply sick of being told who was supposed to win.
It's a pattern that seems to be showing up frequently in the current Democratic presidential campaign; whenever a candidate is proclaimed inevitable by the media, a voter backlash occurs. We saw it in Iowa. We saw it in New Hampshire. Now we're seeing it again.
Being the underdog is often politically advantageous; in this case, it was. Obama's coronation was perceived as premature, and combined with his youth and alleged-inexperience, his aura of inevitable could have been interpreted as arrogance. Hillary may not always be the most likeable candidate, but her fall from grace helped win the sympathy of voters.
The media, with its typically soft coverage of Obama, and their endless stream of negative stories about Hillary, didn't help matters. Complaints of biased media coverage often make candidates look like pathetic, whiny losers. But in Hillary's case, her not-so-subtle claims of media bias actually resonated with voters, mainly because there was a great deal of truth to them. A surprise flurry of harsh questions directed towards Obama at a press conference on the eve of the primaries was unable to atone for the widely perceived slanting of election coverage.
In the end, the message was clear: voters will decide who gets the nomination, and the contest is far from over.
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