It's Not Over Yet

By Karen Tumulty

The idea behind the new, fast-forward primary calendar that Democrats unveiled this election season was to give a big, hyperdemocratic finale to the process of picking a nominee. Nearly two dozen states, tired of standing on the sidelines as future Presidents lavished attention on places like Ottumwa, Iowa, and Nashua, N.H., had muscled their way to an early spot on the calendar. Proportional delegate allotment -- instead of winner-take-all results -- would ensure that every vote mattered. Super Tuesday would be the closest thing we have ever seen to a national primary: a single day on which the candidates had to prove themselves to every slice of the American electorate in states that are home to nearly half the population of the country. It was supposed to settle everything.

It settled nothing. In a result now achingly familiar to the Democratic Party, Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama split the popular vote 50.2% to 49.8%, by a margin so thin, you could barely slide a butterfly ballot betwixt. Tuesday slipped into Wednesday without anyone knowing for sure how many delegates each candidate had captured, as provisional ballots in New Mexico were slowly tabulated by hand.

The grand plan for Super Tuesday, it turns out, depended on one candidate having superior strength, assets and popularity. Instead, the two superstar candidates and their dueling arsenals canceled each other out. Obama's greatest strength was among upscale voters, African Americans, younger people, liberals and those with college educations. He ran even with Clinton among men. Clinton drew strong support from women, older voters, Hispanics, lower-income people and those with less education. And even those gaps were shrinking, as Clinton's edge among women narrowed in some states and Obama's inroads with white voters increased.

Now the campaign that was supposed to end continues to the states that didn't join the stampede to move their primaries forward. Far from being an afterthought as just about everyone had expected, they have the power to crown the winner. And if they don't? The decision may well fall to some 800 party insiders known as super-delegates. Yes, that's right: the perverse result of all this additional democracy, in which more people than ever before will have had a voice, could be that Democrats have to turn to old-style backroom politics to select a nominee.

Rather than bringing clarity and closure, Super Tuesday left the Democratic race as confused as it has ever been. Having trailed Clinton by double digits in most Super Tuesday state polls only weeks before, Obama came away from the day's voting having won more states -- 13 to her 8 -- and slightly more delegates than she did. But Clinton had considerable bragging rights as well. She won California, the night's biggest prize, and a slightly larger percentage of the popular vote and took particular glee in routing Obama in Massachusetts, despite all the hoopla that had surrounded Obama's endorsement by Senator Edward Kennedy and much of his family, as well as the state's other Senator, 2004 Democratic nominee John Kerry, and Governor Deval Patrick.

Clinton strategists, perhaps wishfully, suggested that Super Tuesday may prove to be a high mark for Obama, coming as it did after a burst of good publicity surrounding his high-profile endorsements and after Clinton stumbled in South Carolina. Said one: "It's going to be hard to find a better week for him."

Indeed, they are working to make sure that is the case. The day of the primaries, the Clinton campaign announced she had agreed to participate in four debates -- a format in which she has dominated -- in the coming month and challenged Obama to do the same. But the Obama campaign is in no rush. "Our schedule's not going to be dictated by the Clinton campaign," said campaign manager David Plouffe.

As the pace of the campaign slows considerably, Obama's aides say, that will play in favor of a candidate who is gaining strength against a far more established front runner. The next round of primaries in particular will be on friendly territory for Obama. He is expected, for instance, to sweep the Beltway cluster of Maryland, Virginia and the District of Columbia, which has a large number of upscale Democrats and African Americans.

And he goes forward with a growing financial advantage, having raised $32 million in January, largely from small donors who can be tapped again. That fund-raising haul was better than twice the $13.5 million that Clinton took in over the same period. If anything, the Super Tuesday results, coupled with additional wins in coming weeks, are likely to bring in an even bigger flood of contributions to Obama, whose Internet-fueled coffers were already flush enough to buy Super Bowl advertising in the post-Super Tuesday primary states.

The Clinton operation, on the other hand, is showing signs of financial stress -- something that would have seemed inconceivable months ago. The day after the primary, the campaign announced that Clinton had loaned her campaign $5 million late last month, a move that spokesman Howard Wolfson said "illustrates Senator Clinton's commitment to this effort and to ensuring that our campaign has the resources it needs to compete and win across this nation." Clinton has relied most heavily on the party's traditional big donors and is finding fewer and fewer who have not already given the maximum legal limit of $2,300 for the primary race. "They've got to produce something out of these next nine states [that vote between Super Tuesday and March 4], or they are going to have some serious money troubles," says Obama adviser Steve Hildebrand.

Clinton is counting on recouping whatever ground she loses over the next few weeks in early March, when Ohio and Texas hold their primaries. Ohio is in economic distress and has large numbers of downscale Democrats. Clinton also expects to draw upon institutional support from organized labor. And the high proportion of Latino voters in Texas, her strategists say, will give her an edge. Obama, however, contends that he is making inroads with that group of voters as well, noting that he won more than 44% of Hispanic votes in Arizona. "As Latino voters get to know me," he said the morning after the election, "we do better."

If the race continues to be close after Texas and Ohio, the last big contest -- Pennsylvania's April 22 primary -- may be the decisive one.

Or maybe not, which leaves only one other means of avoiding a vicious floor fight at August's Democratic National Convention in Denver. In the past few weeks, the Clinton and Obama campaigns have both stepped up their courtship, cajoling and sometimes arm-twisting of super-delegates. These are the roughly 800 party insiders -- including elected officials, national-committee members and state chairmen -- who get to vote at the convention by virtue of the positions they hold.

The super-delegates were created by the Democratic Party in the aftermath of the 1980 election for just this sort of eventuality. But the campaign for their support is a frustrating exercise for both candidates. Any commitments they manage to secure are etched in talcum powder; super-delegates don't have to make a choice until the convention, and they can change their mind an endless number of times between now and then.

The Clinton campaign boasts that it maintains a super-delegate advantage over Obama of about 100 votes. However, Obama campaign manager Plouffe insisted in an election-night conference call with reporters that his team had whittled her lead among these party insiders to about 55. But these two campaigns should know by now: this is one year when it's dangerous to count on anything.