Once again, it's do-or-die time for Senator Hillary Clinton. She is trailing Senator Barack Obama and has to win the Pennsylvania primary on Today – and she has to win convincingly in order to narrow the gap and appear competitive in the remaining handful of contests. The latest major polls show her winning Pennsylvania by an average of five points. That is not enough to make substantial headway in either delegate count or the popular vote. But Senator Clinton campaign aides have made clear that a win is a win and that they plan to spin even a narrow victory into a major loss for Senator Obama. The Clinton campaign continues to ramble on with the argument of winning the large states, while in reality history shows that states like California, New York and Pennsylvania will vote Democrat no matter which candidate wins the nomination.
If Senator Clinton wins Pennsylvania by 10 points or more, that would give Senator Obama a jolt – but she would still face a steep climb in the remaining contests to capture the nomination. Her only hope is to get close in either the delegate count or the popular vote and then persuade enough of the superdelegates that she would be the stronger nominee against Republican Senator John McCain in November. Senator Obama leads in the Associated Press's overall delegate count 1,647 to 1,508, including the latest superdelegate to declare for him, Enid Goubeaux, a Democratic National Committee member from Ohio. A candidate needs 2,025 delegates to clinch the nomination. Obama leads in the popular vote by more than 800,000 votes.
In some ways, Pennsylvania is like Ohio, with its large working-class population, lots of older voters, and big Roman Catholic population. Those demographics tilt toward Senator Clinton. Since she won Ohio by 10 points, some analysts say that's her benchmark for Pennsylvania. But that will only give her approximately 7 or 8 gained delegates. She basically has to win by 15 percentage points to really gain ground. It will basically be an East-West battle; she wins the West (more rural older White blue-collar voters); he wins the East (more urban younger Black educated voters). One plus for Obama is the surge of new voters that have registered in Pennsylvania, 270,000 of them since November. Of those, 230,000 are Democrats, or 7 percent of the state party's rolls. In the latest polls 52 percent of them are backing Senator Obama.
The next contests, North Carolina and Indiana, could also present Senator Clinton with a must-win scenario. If she wins Pennsylvania, as expected, she then must do well in Indiana, where polls are close, as Senator Obama is expected to win North Carolina handily.
As we come down to the end of the primary contests I am becoming more convinced that the Democratic National Committee will say in June that whoever is leading after the last primary on June 3 is the Democratic presidential nominee and the other will be the vice-president nominee. If you go to both candidates' websites you will discover that they have basically the same positions. So it is who do you believe is the more honest candidate and which one will be able to get things done in Washington; remembering that to get things done in the capitol takes help from Democrats and Republicans and that most Republicans will not even listen to anything that Senator Clinton says.
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