Archive for the 'Hillary Clinton' Category
July 15th, 2008 by Bob Schwartz
Since Barack Obama doesn’t seem too keen on helping his former foe retire her $20 million in campaign debt, Hillary Clinton has had to resort to plan B, selling trinkets. The flagship of her debt retirement plan, besides asking you to send money, is selling a $50 T-shirt that reads:
“For everyone who’s ever been counted out but refused to be knocked out and for everyone who works hard and never gives up, this one is for you!”
But maybe it should read:
“Because I was too stubborn to see the writing on the wall and concede earlier, I racked up this enormous debt that I am asking you my supporters to retire. And all your $50 gets you in return is this stinkin’ T-shirt”
I’d buy one of those.
June 10th, 2008 by Bob Schwartz
Yesterday I documented one case of a Hillary Clinton supporter that is going to great lengths to express his anger over Barack Obama winning the nomination. The site now claims 35,000 supporters and according to the counter, has received over 1.3 million hits.
Yesterday CNN took that movement a bit further when they announced the result of a new poll they performed that shows that Ed Hale (the webmaster of the site mentioned above) is not alone.
A newly released CNN/Opinion Research Corp. poll found that if Obama does not select Clinton as his running mate, 22 percent of her supporters would stay home this fall — and another 17 percent would vote for McCain.
So what does that mean? If you remember, Clinton liked to refer to her 18 million voters when trying to justify staying in the race and if CNN’s polling is even somewhat accurate, that would mean that there could be as many as 3 million Democrats willing to change ranks to vote for John McCain.
I have an idea as to what is behind these numbers, one only needs to look at the exit polling in Kentucky and West Virginia. Considering that Obama’s platform is almost a carbon copy of Clinton’s, could their be other reasons? I hope so.
June 9th, 2008 by Bob Schwartz
The Democrats just concluded a long and hard fought contest for their nomination for President this fall. Along the way it appears some had their feelings hurt and one Hillary Clinton supporter in particular has taken it to new heights.
Self proclaimed “life long” Democrat Ed Hale is angry and he isn’t going to take it anymore in regards to the process that gave Barack Obama the nomination and he has started a grassroots organization that seeks to make the DNC and Barack Obama pay for cheating his beloved Hillary.
They have treated Hillary Clinton worst than I would treat a mad dog. This site is up to get like minded people to join so if they do go ahead and nominate Obama, we will be ready to make sure that he never goes to the White House. If Hillary get the nomination, then I will be leading the charge for her.
Bad spelling and just downright unprofessional website aside (hey Ed, Wordpress is free and comes with lots of template choices), how does Hale seek to punish us for our transgressions? He wants all Hillary supporters to put their support behind the candidate that represents the complete opposite of what Clinton stands for, Republican nominee John McCain.
That will teach us, instead of supporting the candidate with virtually the same platform as your gal, you instead will work to put us in the same boat that we have been in for the last 8 years.
June 4th, 2008 by Bob Schwartz
Continuing my theme of wondering out loud what each primary means. What does Hillary’s final splash in South Dakota mean? Unlike the landslide victories she had of late in Kentucky and West Virginia, race wasn’t the big story. What was?
- A Clinton in the state every day for a week works, especially when your opponent has already moved on to campaigning in states that matter in the general election.
- ARG’s reputation for horrible polling was again earned. They got the correct winner but missed just about everything else, by a mile…
- As much as we would have liked to believe it, our “last in the nation” primary had little if any effect of the nomination process. But heck, at least this time we felt like it did.
- Hillary Clinton has a hard time facing reality. Despite Obama having the delegate numbers needed to get the nomination, she has so far refused to acknowledge that fact.
- A frighteningly large number of Hillary supporters also cannot face reality. Some are still calling for her to continue lobbying the super delegates and take the fight all the way to the convention. Many of these same so-called “Democrats” would also rather vote for John McCain in the general election than vote for Obama (see exit polls from Kentucky and West Virginia).
- John McCain’s speech writing leaves much to be desired. The speech he gave last night as the polls closed here in an attempt to steal some of the thunder from the Democrats was laughable. He better improve on that quickly if he wants to have a chance against the silver tongued Barack Obama.
With our contest last night, primary season is officially over and unless you are one of the Hillary supporters mentioned above, it is time to head on to the convention and then general election. It also means that South Dakota’s moment in the political limelight has likely passed for another few decades (if we had a moment at all). Will we see anything like this before the general election? I would have to venture a guess and say no so I hope you enjoyed it.
But then again who knows, maybe Obama or McCain will decide to go pheasant hunting this October and schedule a rally here so that they can charge the travel to the campaign…or not.
UPDATE: Wow, talk about those unwilling to face reality. These folks are not only still rallying behind Hillary and urging her to take it all the way to Denver, they are calling for Obama to concede!?
McCain might have lost the Religious Right vote but it appears he will be making that loss up by gaining the wacky left.
June 3rd, 2008 by Bob Schwartz
The AP is reporting that based on public declarations from delegates as well as what other super delegates are telling them, if Barack Obama gets at least 30% of the vote both here and in Montana, he will have hit the magic number of 2118 to win the nomination.
Even using the somewhat questionable ARG poll numbers that have Obama getting trounced 60-34% here in South Dakota combined with the expected outright Obama win in Montana, he could conceivably have the nomination sewn up before we wake up tomorrow morning. That would also mean that Hillary would have pretty much run out of excuses for staying in.
On a side note, I just finished voting here in Canistota and from what the polling workers told me, turnout so far at least , has been fairly light (can it be otherwise in a town of 800?). I’m not sure if that is an omen one way or another for the Presidential primary but it was nice for me. I would have hated to have to wait very long considering the Democratic ballot here in District 25 consisted of 1 item…
June 3rd, 2008 by Bob Schwartz
There was some thought that the announcement that Hillary was letting some of her advance staff go was a precursor to her quitting the race. Upon hearing that I figured Hillary was looking for one last fling in today’s primaries so that she could go out with a victory. If what Politico’s Ben Smith is reporting though is true, quitting could be the farthest thing from her mind.
A Clinton donor tells me that on a conference call today with major
fundraisers this afternoon, Harold Ickes told them Clinton isn’t
planning to drop out. He pressed donors to stay unified, and reviewed
tactical options, including challenging the Michigan delegation.
State finance committees are also circulating letters to deliver to
Clinton tomorrow in New York, and I’ve obtained a draft of the Illinois
finance committee’s letter, being circulated by a Clinton fundraising
aide, Rafi Jafri, which stresses a fight until the convention, and a
resolution in “August, and no earlier.”
Would Hillary be committing political suicide and handing the GOP the White House at the same time? Stay tuned as this could get ugly.
June 2nd, 2008 by Bob Schwartz
Talk about being all over the map, American Research Group came out with a poll earlier today that had Hillary Clinton winning South Dakota by 26%. That number sounded a bit screwy to me and this evening the projection site FiveThirtyEight.com released their data which has Barack Obama winning by 5 points.
Prediction: Our model’s official prediction is Obama 52.5 percent, Clinton 47.5 percent, for a margin of 5 points exactly. We’re also projecting distinctly heavy turnout of 130,915 voters out of South Dakota’s roughly 200,000 registered Democrats, for voting tallies of Obama 68,701, Clinton 62,213, a net gain of about 6500 votes for Mr. Obama.
Delegate wise, with just one congressional district, South Dakota is completely boring. The final split will almost certainly wind up being 8-7 for one or the other candidate. A candidate would need to win by 22.2 points to get a 9th delegate, and would earn a 10th delegate if they won by 25 points. So our delegate projection is Obama 8, Clinton 7.
I know that this isn’t one of the big boys so I am relaying their data just for reference but since the big polling groups seem to be awfully quiet in regards to our primary I’m going with what’s out there.
With that said, based strictly on my own personal observations, I would have to think that FiveThirtyEight’s numbers appear more in line with what I think will be the results tomorrow though it could go either way as far as who actually ends up winning by that 5%.
June 2nd, 2008 by Bob Schwartz
The American Research Group has released their latest poll for the primary tomorrow and it has Hillary up 60-34%.
Hillary Clinton leads Barack Obama 56% to 39% among men (46% of likely Democratic primary voters). Among women, Clinton leads 63% to 29%.
Clinton leads 57% to 38% among voters age 18 to 49 (46% of likely Democratic primary voters) and Clinton leads 63% to 30% among voters age 50 and older.
11% of likely Democratic primary voters say they would never vote for Hillary Clinton in the primary and 27% of likely Democratic primary voters say they would never vote for Barack Obama in the primary.
Has anyone seen any other polls with anything even close to this sort of advantage?
UPDATE - From what I can tell ARG polls aren’t well known for their accuracy and at times have been way off base but they did come pretty close lately in West Virginia and Kentucky plus they seem to be the only game in town at the moment. I have a very hard time believing these numbers but I guess the proof will be in the pudding when the results become known tomorrow.
June 2nd, 2008 by Bob Schwartz
Just a quick thought on Hillary’s latest and only remaining argument on why she is still around and should be nominated. The queen of every vote counts says she is winning the popular vote. Of course many estimates of Hillary’s vote totals conveniently do not count votes from 14 states that Obama did very well in, because of course they don’t vote, they caucus which sort of throws the proverbial monkey wrench in her everyone’s vote should count argument, but I digress.
Anyway, considering the media continues to report Hillary’s vote total spin as something relevant and Hillary’s latest ad touts these vote total numbers, more than any primary candidate in history according to her, I thought I would throw some spin in the other direction using math calculations from someone not cashing a check signed by the Clinton campaign.
The results from this non-Clinton endorsed math tries to fairly (relative to what I’m not sure) represent and include the caucus numbers from the 14 states and the results are slightly different (surprise!) than Hillary’s.
Obama
17,780,516 votes
Clinton
17,589,514 votes
So what exactly do these numbers mean? As with Hillary’s numbers from her campaign ad, obsoletely nothing but there is one number that does matter and it is a lot smaller than the 17 million number being bandied about. That number is 44 and it is the number of delegates that Obama needs as of this writing to reach 2117. The number that makes every Clinton argument moot…
June 2nd, 2008 by Bob Schwartz
Now that the Michigan and Florida debacle has been somewhat resolved providing basically no help to her floundering chances, has Hillary finally decided to accept reality? While she publicly continues to put up a determined front, privately she is sending emails to her advanced staff hinting otherwise.
Members of Hillary Clinton’s advance staff received calls and emails this evening from headquarters summoning them to New York City Tuesday night, and telling them their roles on the campaign are ending, two Clinton staffers tell my colleague Amie Parnes.
The advance staffers — most of them now in Puerto Rico, South Dakota, and Montana — are being given the options of going to New York for a final day Tuesday, or going home, the aides said. The move is a sign that the campaign is beginning to shed — at least — some of its staff. The advance staff is responsible for arranging the candidate’s events around the country.
With the future of her campaign in doubt, Clinton hasn’t announced her plans for the final election night of the primary cycle or beyond, but the aides said she would stage her election night event in New York City. Her entourage is currently expected to wake up Tuesday in New York and to arrive in Washington, D.C. Tuesday night.
Clinton’s senior aides didn’t respond to requests for comment on her Tuesday night plans.
Maybe the South Dakota primary will have some meaning after all, it might provide Hillary with her last victory (still in doubt by the way) before finally bowing out.
UPDATE: More reports are starting coming out about Hillary possibly suspending her campaign.