Friday, March 07, 2008

A Delegate Balance


I got this from C.L. yesterday:

We drove into Deer Corn to go to the Democratic Precinct Convention. We got to the EMS building at 7:30 as is called for but couldn't get in the front door. "The door is stuck." said a voice from inside. The vote counters were still inside counting. They let us in the side door and wanted to know what we wanted? "Did we need to vote?"

There was one other person there, the president of the Chamber of Commerce, and a fugitive from Dallas. We stood around and tried to get the people to let us have our caucus. They had no clue what we were talking about at first. Then I said to the lady with the red shirt, "Like on television news. The meeting where we vote again, the Texas Two Step thing." "Oh, yeah." she said. "I don't know nothing about it."

By 8 PM she had called her boss, the county clerk, and then finally the Democratic Chair on the line. An ancient hunch backed lady with a walker found our envelope and we got started. We elected our chair and secretary and delegates. Two votes for Obama and one for Hillary and we all get to go to the County convention as delegates.

By 9 PM we were through and on the way back home. We learned how democracy works in rural America."

You may remember last Friday's post on Polls and Polling. In it, I suggested a metric to view the Texas primary. This white/black/hispanic was 45/22/29

"I don't know what the real W/B/H mix is going to be in the Texas Primary, and apparently, neither do the pollsters. But if we use the PPP poll as a yardstick, we can perhaps come to this metric.

If the the second number is higher than 22, that's good for Obama, if the third number is higher than 29, that's good for Clinton.You can do the same thing with age. In the Insider Advantage poll where Obama is behind, 20 year olds represent only 10% of the total. In the Survey USA poll where Clinton is behind, that number is closer to 20%. (tabs are for different ages)"

Well, according to the exit polls , the number was 48/16/32.

And the 18-29 year olds only represented 16%.

Garry Mauro and the Clinton campaign did a bang up job of getting the Hispanic vote out. And although Obama carried the major cities, Houston did not turn out as heavily as was hoped.

Even with the popular vote win however, it looks like the state may actually be won by Obama. The results are not even trickling in today. They are dripping. With 40% reporting, Obama is leading 54-46.

According to the Obama web site,

"Our projections show the most likely outcome of yesterday's elections will be that Hillary Clinton gained 187 delegates, and we gained 183.

That's a net gain of 4 delegates out of more than 370 delegates available from all the states that voted."

If that projection holds up, and given that Clinton won 9 in Ohio, and gained one in the Rhode Island/Vermont split, Obama will win Texas by 4 or 5 delegates. This is somewhat confirmed by this article from Austin Statesman.

If you go to the Texas Democratic Party web site, you'll see next to nothing, except a link to the Secretary of State.

I would imagine there is a major war going on right now in Texas D land.

If Obama delegates outnumber the Clinton delegates, they will control the delegation, and they will elect the chairman of the delegation. (Someone correct me on this if I'm wrong please) You can count on Mauro fighting that tooth and nail.

That's where the story is.

It's like running up more yards in a football game

while the other team gets more points.

We don't have any problem understanding that in football,

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