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COLUMNISTS
TODAY'S STORIES
20.05.2008
Gaming Out Oregon

For those still hanging on every pledged delegate, FiveThirtyEight has an interesting, district-by-district breakdown of the way things are likely to shake out in Oregon tonight. In general, he argues that demographics should have made Oregon a toss-up, but that Hillary's recent strategic decisions have made it pretty safe for Obama:

My modeling was consistently showing Oregon to be a toss-up state -- leaning only slightly to Obama. And if Oregon had voted back in February, maybe it would have been a toss-up. It might be noted that in Washington's beauty contest primary (which the model does not use directly in its estimates), Obama beat Clinton by just 3 points. And Washington should be a couple of points stronger for Obama than Oregon, as it is wealthier and has a somewhat larger black population.

But now, that isn't how Oregon is likely to vote. Clinton smartly recognized that the states that were scheduled to vote late in the primary process were moderate or conservative-leaning states. As such, she has moved somewhat to Obama's right. That's going to work to her benefit in places like Kentucky, but she's liable to pay a price for it in the one Kerry state that remained on the calender, which is Oregon. Tack on a couple of points for the fact that Obama has engaged the state more actively, and he could be looking at a double digit margin. ...

Keep in mind that about 4-5 points of our projected margin stems from the fact that Obama has spent more time on the ground in Oregon. Without that campaign activity, the state looked to be just close enough that Clinton must have faced a tough decision about whether or not to campaign seriously there. It's likely, however, Clinton effectively decided her fate when she decided to move to the political center; an issue like the gas tax moratorium plays quite badly in Oregon. Her goal was to have a strong showing in North Carolina and Indiana, perhaps even running the table in every state but Oregon. But Oregon was probably going to have to be sacrificed to enable that strategy.

--Noam Scheiber

Posted: Tuesday, May 20, 2008 12:04 PM with 6 comment(s)

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epicciuto said:

How did she move to the right, exactly? The gas tax moratorium isn't really a right-wing issue. It seems she moved populist, not left or right. She changed her tone, not her substance.

May 20, 2008 12:16 PM

roidubouloi said:

She moved right by adopting Republican tropes.  Political speech is all coded.  What has substance got to do with it?  What has substance got to do with any of this?

May 20, 2008 12:28 PM

Rhubarbs said:

I don't know, roid, I'm with epi on this one. (Granting, first off, that Hillary is already as far to the right as any Northern Democrat can be, voting with the president on most military and foreign-policy issues, for the Patriot Act, consistently voting against civil liberties and often voting with the GOP on symbolic and cultural issues.)

Hillary's version of the gas-tax holiday is actually quite old-school leftist. It's based on the theory that you can lift the retail sales tax on a commodity, impose exactly the same dollar-value in taxation on the producers of that commodity, and expect the end price to the consumer to go down. That would work in, say, North Korea. But in any free-market country, the producer you're taxing will simply raise the wholesale price of the commodity to cover the new taxes and pass it on to the end consumer. It kind of takes an early-1970s campus leftist mindset to believe that you can get something for nothing by shifting the tax burden from one side of the cash register to the other.

May 20, 2008 2:26 PM

roidubouloi said:

You need not debate the substance with me, rhubarbs.  When it came up, I posted that we would be better off raising the gas tax and giving out the money raised as a per capita tax rebate.  

It doesn't matter whether the "origin" if this idea is in some sense the "old left."  Sometimes positions get swapped from one side to the other, as it is all about symbolism.  In this case, having been first adopted by McCain, it is a right trope -- part of the anti-tax meta-meme I think -- eagerly adopted by Hillary who seems to have forgotten which party she belongs to.  She has also jigged over to the standard Republican memes about "hardworking whites" and pointy-headed intellectual elites in order to goose her votes in WV and KY, having nothing to lose.

My point is that the substance is quite irrelevant.  She has moved right by jumping into the Republican rhetorical space.  That a political historian might find left or other roots to the rhetoric is of no present importance.

May 20, 2008 2:53 PM

liberal reformer said:

Epicciuto and rhubarbs: Kudos to you both for your acute comments. At least some people are competent and persuasive analysts out here.

May 20, 2008 3:51 PM

bradigan said:

wonder what sort of calculations one would have to perform to come up with obama as leader...

"If all states with popular vote totals are counted — which would exclude four caucus states that have not released numbers — Mrs. Clinton would lead Mr. Obama by more than 26,000 votes out of more than 33 million cast. By other calculations, Mr. Obama is ahead in the popular vote."

May 20, 2008 6:37 PM