Six weeks ago, I tried to calculate the odds of Senator Clinton catching up to Senator Obama in the total popular vote, which at the time Clinton's surrogates were suggesting was possible and should be the benchmark that superdelegates should consider.
Without getting back into those weeds, I had argued that Clinton would have to get at least a net gain of 200,000 votes out of Pennsylvania, similar to her gain from Ohio, because after that there aren't any other states big enough to close the gap. And I tried to figure out what kind of margin she would need to get that number.
I looked at 2004, when 770,000 people voted in the Democratic primary in Pennsylvania. Then I took the increase in Ohio between 2004 and 2008, which was about 50%, and rounded up, up, up to guess that the maximum turnout would be about 1.2 million. Unlike Ohio, which was an open primary and any independent or Republican could participate, Pennsylvania's is closed, so the potential for increasing turnout was much more limited. And 1.2 million had been the turnout in the colossal 2002 gubernatorial primary between Ed Rendell and Bob Casey, Jr.
Based on that reasonable-sounding estimate, I figured that Clinton would need close to a 60-40, twenty-point win to net 200,000 votes.
In fact, Clinton fell just short of a net gain of 200,000 votes, even though she won by eight points, rather than twenty. Why? Because participation didn't increase by half from 2004, it didn't almost double as I speculated -- it tripled. That messed up my math.
I think the real story that some of us Obama-admirers are missing is that in fact both candidates are attracting enthusiastic supporters and new Democrats, although perhaps for different reasons. Nothing in the Clinton strategy was built to deal with the possibility that two-thirds of the Democratic primary electorate in a key state would be people who probably had never voted in a Democratic primary, and yet her campaign figured out -- finally -- how to embrace the current political opportunity, rather than play 1996 all over again. Her performance in the Philadelphia suburban counties, particularly Montgomery and Bucks, is far more revealing of this achievement than her predictable success in blue-collar base communities like her own new hometown of Scranton.
It is too late, though. And she did need more than 200,000.
-- Mark Schmitt.
