No, Hillary Clinton shouldn't be winning

Sean Wilentz spun a fantasy in his Salon piece about Clinton's electability. In the real world, it's Barack Obama who's more electable.

By Brad DeLong

Read more: Democratic Party, Hillary Rodham Clinton, John McCain, Opinion, Barack Obama, 2008 election

April 10, 2008 | Hillary Rodham Clinton has won fewer votes this spring in contested primaries than Barack Obama. She has persuaded fewer of her supporters to turn out for caucuses. She has won fewer pledged delegates. Yet Sean Wilentz writes that she "should be winning." And in response I say: "Huh?"

It turns out that when Sean Wilentz says that Hillary Clinton "should be winning" the race for the Democratic presidential nomination, what he means is that if all the Democratic caucuses and primaries had been winner-take-all, then "Clinton would now have 1,743 pledged delegates to Obama's 1,257."

Sean Wilentz is a Yankees fan. I am a Red Sox fan. Perhaps Sean Wilentz could write that the American League championship should go to the team with the most hits instead of the most wins, which would have made the Yankees rather than the Red Sox the real champions last year. After all, isn't the real point of baseball to hit the ball and get on base? That's why it's called baseball, and not run-ball or win-ball, right? I would not find that argument convincing. Wilentz's winner-take-all gambit is a talking point, not an argument: "If my grandmother had wheels, she would be a bus" is rarely a persuasive line of reasoning. If the rules for winning delegates and the nomination had been different, the candidates would have run different campaigns and put their resources into different places and different proportions.

Is there another argument out there, one based on the way things actually work in 2008? Does Sean Wilentz have an argument that, say, a critical mass of superdelegates might take as a reason that they should support Hillary Clinton over Barack Obama for the Democratic presidential nomination? Reading through his piece, I see unsupported allegations of cheating, references to "blatantly anti-democratic maneuvers" by the Obama campaign, and "the same kind of tactics as George Bush's camp used in Florida in 2000." But I find two, and only two, things that I would take to be real arguments. They are interrelated:

1) "Clinton has won the popular vote in all ... large states [except Illinois]." Wilentz claims that Clinton is the stronger candidate because she would deliver big states in the fall.

2) "The latest state-by-state figures ... indicate that if the election were held today, Clinton would defeat McCain ... because of her lead in big, electoral-vote-rich states such as Florida, Ohio and Pennsylvania -- and McCain would beat Obama."

Argument 1 is simply wrong. Small states have electoral votes too -- more electoral votes per capita, in fact, than large states. A good many large states are not in play in any reasonable election: The Democrat will win New York and California, and the Republican will win Texas and Georgia, unless it is an absolute blowout landslide.

Argument 2, by contrast, is interesting, since it posits that Clinton is the stronger candidate against the GOP nominee in specific swing-state matchups. If true, this could provide a good reason for public-spirited superdelegates to support Hillary Rodham Clinton over Barack Obama at the Democratic National Convention. Wilentz cites "DaveOinSF," writing on March 20 at MyDD, who updated state-by-state polls and found that Hillary Clinton does better than Barack Obama against John McCain in 13 swing states, meaning the 13 states where the margin between the two major-party candidates in the last two presidential elections was closest to the nationwide split. In five states with a total of 42 electoral votes -- Michigan, New Hampshire, Iowa, Nevada and Colorado, Obama beats McCain and Clinton does not. In four states with a total of 78 electoral votes -- Pennsylvania, Minnesota, Florida and Ohio -- Clinton beats McCain and Obama does not. Both Democrats lead McCain in three states with 22 electoral votes, Oregon, Wisconsin and New Mexico. McCain beats both Democrats in Missouri, which has 11 electoral votes.

I take this to be an argument about "electability," meaning an assertion about which candidate has the greatest chance of capturing the electoral votes of the true swing states. I take Wilentz to be saying that Barack Obama is less electable -- that there is something about Barack Obama and his campaign that makes him less likely to win a majority of electoral votes in a close election this November.

Unfortunately for all of us, Wilentz doesn't develop this argument. This means that I have to do Sean Wilentz's job as well as my own.

The Argument Sean Wilentz Should Have Made
So: Consider the 153 electoral votes in these 13 swing states -- Michigan, Pennsylvania, Minnesota, Oregon, Wisconsin, New Hampshire, Iowa, New Mexico, Florida, Ohio, Nevada, Missouri and Colorado. What reasons do we have to think that one or the other of the Democratic candidates would have an easier time capturing the bulk of these crucial electoral votes?

The best -- what I think is actually the only -- "electability" argument for Hillary Clinton was made by Josh Marshall of Talking Points Memo in a commentary on posts by bloggers David Sirota and Brendan Nyhan. Marshall wrote that he believes that states with a midsize African-American population are especially difficult for Obama to win:

[R]acially polarized voting increases with the size of the black population in a given state. That leaves Obama winning a lot of states with few blacks. But once the black population gets into the high single digits, racialized voting kicks in and Obama then can't get enough of the white population to win. Only when blacks approach 20% of the population does the black population get large enough to make up for and often overcome the increased white resistance to voting for Obama ...

Next page: Is this argument true? Is it supported by statistical fact? As best as I can tell, no