The Old Eighteen

So much for the exit polls

With 90% of the precincts reporting, Hillary is leading 55%-45%.  It's still not the massive blowout that she needed to completely derail Obama, but it's a substantial enough victory that she and the corporate media will be able to keep her campaign going, at least for a few more weeks.  The tools at MSNBC are already in full spin mode, talking as if this suddenly changes the whole dynamic of the presidential race and obliterates the fact that Obama still leads in pledged delegates and total primary votes.  And Hillary will get a fundraising spike out of this, though I doubt that it's going to be enough to fundamentally change the financial hurdles that she has in front of her.

Bottom line: Pennsylvania is a state that was tailor-made for Hillary to win, and she should have won it by a much wider margin than she did.  She's going to get a temporary bump in the polls, but it won't carry through to the next round of votes two weeeks from now.  She'll get clobbered in North Carolina, possibly by 10 points or more, and that will negate muich of what she won tonight; meanwhile, Indiana is a tossup.  Unless she performs at least as well in both of those states as she did in Pennsylvania, and that's just not going to happen, she has no chance of convincing superdelegates to give her the nomination.  But it would be really nice if we could end this thing sooner rather than later, so we can get on to dealing with our opponent in the fall instead of forcing our eventual nominee to spend precious time and money fighting a two-front war against both the Republican nominee and a sore loser who doesn't care if we win in November if she's not on the ballot.

Too close to call

The polls have closed in Pennsylvania, and the media (MSNBC, anyway) are saying that it's too close to call at this point.  The exit polls indicate that Hillary Clinton will win, but by less than 5 points - if that holds out, it could be over for her.  At the very least, this isn't going to be the blowout Hillary needs.

Here we go again

From the LA Times:

Obama strategists said Monday that they expected to announce a series of additional endorsements by uncommitted superdelegates shortly after Pennsylvania votes. A strong showing by Obama in Pennsylvania would give superdelegates more comfort in coming forward, but a bad loss might send them back to the assessment stage.

We heard something similar prior to the Texas and Ohio votes, which never materialized - probably because Obama underperformed in those two big contests.  It'd be nice if Obama keeps it close tonight and gets a wave of superdelegate endorsements, but I wouldn't hold my breath waiting for it to happen.

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(via Billary Redux at Daily Kos)