Put aside message and money, and one realizes that Put aside message and money, and one realizes that Barack Obama won this thing because his strategists and field team, led by David Plouffe and aided considerably the Hildebrand-Tewes consulting team and a dose of targeting genius from Strategic Telemetry’s Ken Strasma, created a strategy designed to maximize the pledged delegates won based on Obama’s support in each state.
The best analytical distillation I have seen of this—and, particularly, of how Obama crushed Hillary Clinton in the caucus states while using the DNC's proportionality rules to minimize his delegate losses in primary states he lost while maximizing them in the primary states he won—is a piece published yesterday called "How Obama Did It" by somebody named Justin Sizemore, writing for University of Virginia professor Larry Sabato's “Crystal Ball ‘08” site.
It's a great read--and it has super tables too, for the numbers geeks, like me, who dig that sort of thang.
--Tom Schaller
