The numbers crunch Hillary in Texas

Late polls show a tight race between Obama and Clinton, but even if Clinton pulls out a popular-vote victory, the delegates will probably go to her opponent.

By Mike Madden

Read more: Texas, Hillary Rodham Clinton, Politics, News, Latinos, Barack Obama, 2008 election, Mike Madden

AP Photo / Carolyn Kaster

Hillary Clinton at a campaign stop Monday at the Austin, Texas, convention center.

March 4, 2008 | AUSTIN, Texas -- It certainly made for an unusual lead-in to the Houston Astros spring-training game on Fox Sports Southwest Monday night: Hillary Clinton taking questions on healthcare, the war in Iraq and the minimum wage from almost 800 Texas voters on a sparse set at a downtown convention center, with Eva Longoria moderating. Maybe baseball dads are this year's soccer moms? ("The views expressed on this program do not represent the views of Fox Sports Net," a voiceover informed viewers immediately afterward.)

Squeezed between "Spurs Insider" and the baseball game, Clinton's "Texas-Size Town Hall" and a subsequent rally a few miles out of town were among her final gambits in a state where her double-digit lead turned into an apparent edge for Obama and now, in late polls, a dead heat. Her strategists, and her husband, once said she had to win here in order to continue her campaign for the White House. By Monday, the Clinton camp had settled on a new line -- she doesn't have to win here, but she will.

Even so, by Tuesday night, she'll be safely ensconced in Ohio, the other big prize up for grabs. She may have chosen to head north because her odds of beating Barack Obama in Ohio are better than in Texas -- or because even if she does win the popular vote here, the Democratic Party's baroque mathematics will probably make Obama the winner anyway.

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Texas apportions delegates via a complicated system that gives Obama's voters more say than Clinton's. About two-thirds of the state's 193 delegates are awarded state Senate district by state Senate district. The delegates in each of those 31 districts are divvied up according to the popular vote within the district. However, those districts that reliably vote Democratic have more delegates. African-American areas in the big cities, and the liberal enclave of Austin, both likely to be Obama strongholds, have the most delegates. Latino areas along the border, which will probably favor Clinton, have somewhat fewer. The votes of those rural whites who support Clinton will have the least weight because they live in red districts. Unlike states such as Ohio, Texas does not give a lump-sum prize to the winner of the statewide popular vote.

After the polls close, at 7 p.m. CST in most of the state, 7 p.m. MST in El Paso, the day's second act begins. And it too seems to favor Obama, who is more popular than Clinton with the party's activist base. Sixty-seven of the state's delegates are apportioned via caucuses that take place in polling places after the primary voting is done.

Still, Clinton's televised town hall, starring local hero Longoria, Miss Corpus Christi 1998, was a last-ditch effort to reach voters in places so out of the way that the campaign couldn't physically swing through in the closing hours. It wound up on Fox Sports, not the kind of cable network known for its pull with Hillary supporters, in part because the time was cheap. The relatively flush Obama campaign put a two-minute commercial on the air Sunday and Monday nights on local newscasts all around the state.

The rally afterward was your standard election eve, get-the-vote-out affair, though the location of the press filing center -- a locker room, with some reporters working directly in front of a row of urinals -- may have been a sign that the Clinton campaign has truly become fed up with the media's treatment of the candidate. The crowd, older than at Obama's events, didn't quite get into the peppiest cheers the warm-up acts led ("H-I, H-I-L, H-I-L-L-A-R-Y, Hillary, our nominee," a complicated singsong number with lots of clapping, fell particularly flat). But when Clinton strolled onstage with Chelsea Clinton and Ted Danson in tow, the room lit up; it didn't feel as though her campaign was in danger of ending Wednesday, despite her 11-election losing streak.

Clinton stuck to a theme the campaign thinks has -- finally -- started to get through to voters: Compared to her, Obama simply isn't up to the job. "Tomorrow, the voters of Texas get to have your voices and your vote heard as to who you think should be the next president of the United States," Clinton said. "Who would you hire to answer that phone in the White House when it rings at 3 in the morning?" Ads with the same message are on the TV and radio, and Clinton aides believe she's recovering some voters who had flipped to Obama.

Next page: "Assume that we're behind"