This has been arguably the most interesting nominating contest in American presidential history and although the continued fight within the Democratic Party will favour the Republicans, few will complain that this epic struggle between two historic candidates has just been prolonged for a while longer

Shameran Abed

New York senator Hillary Clinton has made a comeback of sorts in the Democratic Party nomination battle for the United States presidential elections in November. Two weeks ago, the campaign of the once-clear front-runner was coming off at the hinges after she had suffered a series of thumping losses at the hands of Illinois senator Barack Obama. Clinton had paid the price for running a poor campaign that was based on propagating an air of invincibility about her. It worked for a while, of course, as she led by wide margins in every national poll and most state polls up until the new year. However, once Obama burst her bubble of invincibility in Iowa and then again in South Carolina, she appeared to have little with which to counter his momentum. On Tuesday, by comfortably winning the Ohio primary and narrowly beating Obama in Texas, Clinton has once again demonstrated her resilience and has managed to give her campaign a fresh lease. Though the odds are still heavily stacked against her, she has proved that she is a fighter who should not be written off just yet.

The biggest mistake that the Clinton campaign had made was in underestimating the appeal of a candidate like Barack Obama. Her campaign had thought that his relative inexperience would turn voters off and also that he would not win enough ‘white’ votes to mount a serious challenge to Clinton, who not only had tremendous name recognition and fund raising capability but also could rely on many of the veterans from her husband’s administration to help her in her bid for the presidency. Yet, Obama was able to turn his relative inexperience into his strength by offering a message of change that resonated with the electorate who were tired of partisan bickering in Washington DC. Obama was the fresh-faced Kennedy-like candidate in contrast to the polarising Clinton. Hence, once the mass exodus started to take place from Camp Clinton to Camp Obama after he won the Iowa caucuses in early January, Hillary was not able to come up with a short-term strategy to stop the tide. She still won contests, most notably in New Hampshire which was hailed as her comeback after the Iowa drubbing, but the trend was clear – Obama was chipping away at her core constituencies and turning states that were once though to be solidly Clinton country into toss-ups.

Things came to a pass for Hillary on February 5, dubbed as ‘Super Tuesday’ because 22 states held their primaries or caucuses on that day. The Clinton campaign had always been confident of producing the knock-out blow on ‘Super Tuesday’ by winning enough states and enough delegates to effectively push Obama out of the campaign. In reality, the opposite happened. Not only was Clinton unable to deliver a knock-out blow, it was Obama who bettered expectations by winning 13 of the 22 states. Also, although Clinton won most of the delegate-rich states like California and New York, she did so by relatively narrow margins, meaning that Obama was able to benefit from the Democratic Party’s proportional representation system by picking up lots of delegates even in states that he lost. As a result, both candidates emerged from ‘Super Tuesday’ with roughly the same number of pledged delegates, i.e. delegates won through elections. Although Clinton’s lead among super delegates – elected party officials like senators, congressmen and governors as well as members of the Democratic National Committee – gave her a slight overall lead, even that was about to change.

So confident had the Clinton campaign been of winning the nomination by February 5 that it had not done any work in the states that were to hold their primaries or caucuses immediately following ‘Super Tuesday’. As a matter of fact, one wonders whether the Clinton campaign had even considered a strategy for the upcoming states until the night of February 5, when results from ‘Super Tuesday’ started to paint a pretty gloomy picture. It was only once it realised that it had failed to take Obama out that her campaign scurried to put up advertisements and get campaign volunteers into the other states. Obama, on the other hand, had banked on frustrating Clinton’s ‘Super Tuesday’ knock-out plan and once he did, he clearly had the upper hand in the upcoming states as his campaign had built organisations in those states and started vigorous canvassing well before Clinton had even considered them. Also, some of those states, such as Virginia and Maryland with their large populations of African-Americans on the one hand and well-off whites on the other, were thought to be easy pickings for Obama given his appeal among those demographic groups. Sure enough, Obama won them comfortably on his way to winning the 11 contests that followed ‘Super Tuesday’. Obama had not only opened up a wide lead among the pledged delegates but was now comfortably ahead in total delegates. Clinton, who had once been the near-presumptive nominee, had almost been dealt the knock-out blow by Obama.

With the super-delegates, who had once overwhelmingly backed Clinton when her nomination was thought to be a mere formality, now flocking to Obama and calls growing louder for Clinton to consider dropping out of the race, her campaign realised that the end game was nearing and that she would have to comfortably win the next two delegate-rich states, Ohio and Texas, to narrow Obama’s delegate lead and to justify staying in the race. Ohio, with large numbers of blue-collar workers, and Texas, with its large Hispanic population, also provided good opportunities for Clinton to halt Obama’s momentum given her appeal among those groups. However, the two weeks between the last primary in Wisconsin on February 19 and the next ones in Texas, Ohio, Rhode Island and Vermont on March 4 also gave Obama an opportunity to introduce himself to voters in those states and to make inroads among the Hispanic population in Texas and the blue-collar workers in Ohio.

With her date with destiny fast approaching, Clinton went on the offensive. Her campaign against Obama had been built on the premise that she was tried and tested while he was untried and inexperienced. The strategy hadn’t worked in earlier contests but Clinton was unwilling to abandon the strategy and find another. Instead, she decided to go at it harder. She launched a television advertisement in the two big states that asked viewers to consider who they would rather have dealing with a crisis if the telephone rang in the White House at 3:00am. The Clinton campaign wanted to insert doubt among voters about whether the fresh-faced senator from Illinois was the better person to deal with a crisis in the middle of the night and project Hillary as the steady and experienced hand. Obama immediately slammed the Clinton campaign for fear-mongering and many people were reportedly upset by what they considered Republican-tactics to win votes. Yet, the advertisement had an impact. Obama had eroded Clinton’s large leads in polls in both Ohio and Texas in the first week of campaigning, but Clinton’s numbers rebounded following the ‘3am’ ad, especially in Ohio. Also, she was able to maintain her leads among the Hispanics and lower-income whites in Texas and Ohio respectively, thus winning both states in addition to picking up the much smaller Rhode Island.

Obama remains the front-runner even after Clinton’s impressive victories on Tuesday and though his delegate lead will be somewhat depleted, it will still be significant. The bigger problem for him now, having failed to take Hillary out, is that he will have to fight her for the support of the super delegates as no candidate can win enough pledged delegates anymore to win the nomination. Super delegates being the establishment and party-insiders, Hillary is thought to have an advantage in gaining their backing but Obama has in his favour the argument that the super delegates should not overturn the verdict of the majority, which is likely to be in Obama’s favour once all the nominating contests are done.

This has been arguably the most interesting nominating contest in American presidential history, and although the continued fight within the Democratic Party will favour the Republicans, few will complain that this epic struggle between two historic candidates has just been prolonged for a while longer.