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Wednesday, February 13, 2008
McCain can’t shake Huck
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
A prominent state senator stopped me in the hall of the legislative office building in Atlanta Tuesday to offer a report on voting among Republicans in Virginia. He was concerned. Hardly anybody was voting in the Republican primary while Democrats were flooding to the polls.
Indeed he was right. Barack Obama swept the state, rolling up 619,036 votes. Fewer than 500,000 Virginians voted Republican. John McCain won with 242,578 votes, beating Mike Huckabee 50-41 percent.
Republicans are starting to get concerned. Despite being the all-but-certain nominee, McCain is just now beginning to crack 50 percent of the Republican vote. In Maryland, he got 55, and in DC, 68, though that translated into fewer than 4,000 votes.
Obama, meanwhile, is blowing Hillary out of the water, prompting the Associated Press to offer the analysis that for Hillary “the list of justifications [for losing] are wearing thin.”
While Democratic delegate allocation formulas make it very likely that the decision will be pushed into the convention, the big day for Hillary is Tuesday, March 4. That’s when voters in Ohio and Texas go to the polls. Hillary’s pulling out all the stops in Texas, launching television ads in English and Spanish. Hispanics could make up half the Democratic voters. In the primaries so far, they’ve gone to her.
Clinton went into Tuesday with 1,147 delegates, to 1,124 for Obama. After big wins by Obama in Virginia, Maryland and Washington, he now has 1,186 to 1,181 for Hillary, with 2,025 needed to win the nomination.
Tuesday settled nothing. The Big Mo continues with Obama — and if it holds out for another two weeks, Hillary’s in real trouble. It wasn’t a great day for McCain, either. With the nomination nearly in the bag, Huckabee continues to hang close — suggesting that as the nominee, McCain has a lot of work to do to sell himself to his own party.
