One prominent polling firm thinks that the race for the Democratic nomination is essentially over:
Rasmussen Reports has been tracking the race for the Democratic Presidential nomination daily for nineteen months… since November 2006. For the last few months, the most remarkable feature of the race has been its consistency and stability. Senators Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton are both running historic campaigns and both have captured the votes and hearts of distinct and important constituencies within the Democratic Party. Obama has won Primaries in states where the demographics favor his campaign and Clinton has won in the states that favor her campaign.
However, while Senator Clinton has remained close and competitive in every meaningful measure, she is a close second and the race is over. It has become clear that Barack Obama will be the Democratic nominee.
At the moment, Senator Clinton’s team is busily trying to convince Superdelegates and pundits that she is more electable than Barack Obama. For reasons discussed in a separate article, it doesn’t matter.
With this in mind, Rasmussen Reports will soon end our daily tracking of the Democratic race and focus exclusively on the general election competition between Republican John McCain and Democrat Barack Obama. Barring something totally unforeseen, that is the choice American voters will have before them in November. While we have not firmly decided upon a final day for tracking the Democratic race, it is coming soon.
Furthermore, in another report, Rasmussen asserts that her one remaining argument to convince superdelegates to side with her has no merit whatsoever:
[T]he larger reality is that the electability argument doesn’t matter. For one thing, most Democrats remain optimistic about Election 2008 and believe that either Democratic candidate will win this year. From that perspective, even if Clinton is theoretically more electable, it’s a distinction without a practical difference.
More importantly, Clinton’s belief that she is more electable rests upon the assumption that she can get the nomination without tearing the Democratic Party apart. That’s not a credible assumption in the minds of Superdelegates. The conventional wisdom is that handing the nomination to Clinton would create a Democratic civil war. No matter how it was explained, a fair number of Obama supporters would sit out the election or vote for a third party candidate. Some might even vote Republican. The bottom line is that the very process of handing her the nomination would make her unelectable.
But, in that scenario, the problems for Democrats would go far deeper. If Obama is denied the nomination, the collateral damage could reduce the number of House and Senate races that Democrats win this year. Why would any Superdelegate want to risk that?
They wouldn’t. And, they won’t.
Because she is a sitting Senator and the wife of a former President, Mrs. Clinton is getting far more deference from the Democratic Party elites than another candidate with less power and a shorter history might get. The fact of the matter is that there is no way that she can legitimately win the nomination without it looking like she stole it from a man who is, whether he wins in November or not, clearly a historical candidate. If the superdelegates side with her, they risk tearing their party apart, and I can’t believe that they’d be that stupid.
