One Side Set

Well, the Republican race is effectively over. Mr. Romney has suspended his campaign. He has not released his delegates just yet. He probably won’t do that until after Mr. McCain has officially clinched. Mr. Romney will still get some votes out of protest, but I sincerely doubt that his voters will rally to Mr. Huckabee. More likely, many Republican primary voters will just stay home since the race is no longer in doubt. We can say this because despite his noble speech about staying in the race, Mr. Huckabee is almost completely mathematically eliminated based on his current delegate totals and the remaining delegates available. 2,380 Republican delegates are available so a candidate needs 1,191 to win. Mr. Huckabee currently has not quite 200 while Mr. McCain has over 700 and Mr. Romney has almost 300. This leaves about 1,200 delegates in the remaining states. Mr. Huckabee would need 5/6th of those delegates that would mean just about every Republican voter going to him. Not going to happen.

Meanwhile, the Democrats are in a sticky mess. Mr. Obama is ahead of Ms. Clinton in the pledged delegates while she is ahead in the Superdelegate count. The net result is that Ms. Clinton has about an 80-delegate lead out of a total of 4,048 delegates. Even though Mr. Obama has momentum and will likely win most of the states prior the March 4th primaries in Texas and Ohio, proportional delegate allocation will keep these two candidates neck and neck probably through all the primaries. That means that winner will have to be decided through the tiebreaker of either Superdelegates or even by reallocating the lost delegates from Michigan and Florida. Both of these would favor Ms. Clinton, although there are rumors that the Democratic Party may hold caucuses in Florida and Michigan to allocate the delegates properly. This would displease Ms. Clinton who won those states (although in an underhanded way in Michigan) and typically does not do as well as Mr. Obama in caucus style venues.

Either way, there is a very real possibility that neither candidate wins a majority based on the votes of the people. Then it suddenly becomes a game among the party elites and bosses. Who does each campaign owe the most favors to, who will make the better deals, etc. This favors Ms. Clinton due the sixteen years that the Clinton machine has been moving things in the party. This starts to give off the air of the smoky backroom that caused so much anger among the populace back in 1968.

The worst-case scenario is that Ms. Clinton emerges from the fray and Mr. Obama lets it be known that he did not agree to the deal. This would alienate African-Americans (already a little miffed at Ms. Clinton) and drive independents into Mr. McCain’s arms. It’s actually in Mr. Obama’s best interests not to have Ms. Clinton win as it sets him up as the betrayed man ready to lead the charge in 2012. A better scenario would be Mr. Obama emerging from the fray leading a united party, but I’m not sure the Clinton machine will relinquish power that easily. Plus, it might drive Latinos further towards Mr. McCain. Latinos are not block voters, but if enough of them are unhappy with Mr. Obama and mollified towards Mr. McCain’s immigration policy, it could keep the Democrats from taking back New Mexico or challenging Mr. McCain in Texas. Even worse would be a defection in mass to cause the numbers to waver in California, but this is an extreme scenario.

Also complicating things for the Democrats is that Mr. McCain can now sit back; gather up a lot of money while he makes nice with the conservatives. Then he can run lots of positive messages about his plans for the country and why we should vote for him. Meanwhile, the Democrats can’t run any positive messages because they don’t have a candidate and will be forced to only run negative ads against Mr. McCain through various 529s.

Now, make no mistake, the Democrats can win this election, but their road keeps becoming harder and harder to climb. If Mr. McCain can make peace with conservatives and bring the base out in reasonable numbers, he will retain most of the states Mr. Bush won and will only need to fight in places like Ohio, Iowa, and Florida. What’s more, with enough resources and fracture among the Democrats, Mr. McCain could even challenge Democratic weak points such as New Hampshire, Wisconsin, and Minnesota (possibly even Pennsylvania if he makes inroads with the African-American community). If the Democrats want the White House, they are going to need to make nice before the convention and hope that Mr. McCain is unable to mend his fences with the Right Wing. Otherwise, it might be a long and bitter four years.