Hillary Clinton’s campaign has been citing the fact that no Democrat has been elected President without winning the West Virginia Primary since 1976 and that no Democrat has been elected President without carrying West Virginia in the General Election since 1916.
While both of these facts are true, there are other facts that don’t bode well for Hillary:
[N]o Democrat has won the White House without carrying Minnesota since 1912 (it went for Teddy Roosevelt’s Bull Moose party) so given that Obama won Minnesota and Clinton won West Virginia, McCain is guaranteed to win the general election unless the eventual nominee can somehow completely replicate the social and political conditions prevailing in pre-WWI America. The outlook, in short, is very grim.
Heh.
Or maybe we just need to remember that history doesn’t always repeat itself:
We only have presidential elections every four years and the circumstances surrounding each one are unique. This one will be spectacularly so in that there’s no incumbent president or vice president on the ticket, a senator is guaranteed to win, and we’ll either elect our oldest first-time president or our first biracial one. Further, both Obama and McCain defy the traditional molds their party candidates have fit into in recent years.
In other words, throw the playbook out the window.
May 14th, 2008 at 9:51 am
and please aim for Hillary, will you?
May 14th, 2008 at 9:54 am
Ha !
Actually, we should probably aim for Hillary AND Bill