It stood to reason that California would be the biggest prize of the Democratic presidential contest on Tsunami Tuesday -- not just because it has far and away the most delegates but because the two other big states voting that day, New York and Illinois, are the home states of the two remaining contestants. Now, on the eve of the election, with Mervyn Field's California Poll showing Hillary Clinton's lead over Barack Obama down to a mere 2 points, and 18 percent of voters still undecided, the question is whether Obama will come up a dollar short in America's mega-state because his own campaign didn't think he could win there.
Certainly, both Clinton's and Obama's schedules since the South Carolina primary a week ago Saturday reflect a shared assessment that the state will likely go to Clinton. The New York senator appeared at three rallies and one fundraiser in the two days following Thursday's debate in Los Angeles. Obama had one invitation-only town hall on the morning of the debate -- not a public rally -- and a fundraiser immediately following the debate, then left California to appear in an odd assortment of states as Feb. 5 approached. He drew 15,000 to a rally in Boise, Idaho, and 20,000 to one in Wilmington, Delaware -- states with fewer delegates to reward than he could win just in a handful of Bay Area congressional districts. (His campaign did host a rally Sunday at UCLA that featured Oprah Winfrey, Caroline Kennedy, Michelle Obama, and, as the unannounced special guest endorser, Maria Shriver. But Obama himself was somewhere over Delaware when the UCLA rally was unfolding.)
Clinton's presence and Obama's absence in California made a certain strategic sense. As recently as 10 days ago, polls in California had Clinton up by close to 20 points. If she could claim victory there as well as in New York and surrounding states on Feb. 5, she could claim front-runner status. Looking at the same polling numbers, the Obama campaign likely calculated that he'd do better if he had some plausible deniability for losing California: He hadn't had time to campaign there. Far better to rack up a number of victories in smaller states to make Tsunami Tuesday look more like a wash than a loss.
The Obama people certainly knew they were closing the gap with Clinton, both nationally and in California (two polls out Sunday show her lead over him cut to 2 and 3 points, respectively). Apparently, they figured that the chance of his victory in the Golden State was still remote enough that they opted for a small-state, rather than a California-centric, strategy. That may prove to be one of the more important tactical decisions in this year's campaign -- whether a mistake or a masterstroke we'll know soon enough.
California may be coming together for Obama, but it's coming together late. The state has seen a large number of new registrations in the 45 days preceding the Jan. 22 cut-off date: 150,000 new Democrats to 40,000 new Republicans, and it's a safe guess that a lot of those new Democrats are Obama-philes. On Friday, the state council of the Service Employees International Union (SEIU), which, with 680,000 members, is by far the largest union in the state, endorsed Obama (it had previously supported John Edwards). With a predictive-dialing phone bank operation that is second to none (one Los Angeles-based local alone has 150 phone lines), the union planned to make 150,000 calls Friday through Sunday confirming the voter preferences of its registered Democratic and independent members, and then to call the Obama supporters and undecided voters on Monday night and Election Day.
SEIU's heavily Latino janitors' local is one reason why the union, in the assessment of Courtni Pugh, its California political director, has "high credibility" with its Latino members and might be able to turn some Latino votes in Obama's direction. A few other last-minute developments in the Latino community have also cut Obama's way, most notably his endorsement on Sunday by La Opinion, Los Angeles' Spanish-language daily paper. Particularly since Edwards' withdrawal, a number of younger Latino organizers have joined up with Obama's campaign, and the campaign opened an office in the heart of Latino East L.A. just last week. But Obama supporters concede that Clinton retains a sizable edge among Latino voters, who comprised 15 percent of the voters in the state's 2004 Democratic primary. (For more on the Latino vote, see Dana Goldstein's "The Fight for the Latino Vote.")
The Obama campaign itself says it has 6,000 precinct captains, while the Clinton campaign also boasts of its extensive field organization. But the California political consultants to whom I've spoken believe that turnout will be so high anyway -- some are estimating 60 percent or more, which would be the highest primary turnout in many decades -- that field operations may only have impact on delegate apportionment in congressional districts that are heavily Republican, in which relatively few Democrats are registered.
But the district-by-district delegate game will be particularly intense on the Republican side. Democrats apportion delegates by proportional representation within congressional districts; Republicans reward all of a district's delegates to the candidate with the plurality of the popular vote. The number of delegates in Democratic districts rises when the district's raw Democratic vote in the last presidential election was high, so high-turnout liberal districts like Henry Waxman's in West L.A. or Nancy Pelosi's in San Francisco are given extra convention delegates. The Republicans give each district three convention delegates, period, so that southern Orange County districts in which 200,000 Republicans routinely vote get no more delegates than inner-city minority districts in which Republican turnout may be as low as 5,000. In the downtown L.A. districts represented in Congress by Maxine Waters and Lucille Roybal-Allard, for instance, a couple of thousand votes may suffice to win all the delegates. That should make for some interesting get-out-the-vote strategies.
Whatever happens Tuesday, nationally, on the Democratic side (barring a mega-upset such as Hillary losing New York), it's likely the contest will continue through Ohio in March and possibly Pennsylvania in April. On the Republican side, John McCain could certainly win the nomination on Tuesday by winning the party's small liberal vote and its larger moderate vote, and splitting the party's largest ideological bloc, conservative voters, with Mitt Romney and Mike Huckabee -- the precise opposite of the Bush-Rove strategy of securing the party's conservative base first and then winning just enough moderates to prevail on Election Day. That doesn't mean that the number of moderates in Republican ranks has waxed and the number of conservatives has waned. McCain's victories so far are a triumph of biography over ideology and of pragmatism over purity -- though Romney is the most impure personification of conservative purity we've seen in some time. He will be remembered as the Platonic Ideal of Inauthenticity -- a perfect foil for McCain.
On the Democratic side, Obama has been playing Beat the Clock. On Tuesday, we'll find out how well.
