As DemConWatch explains, we can't automatically assume that John Edwards' delegates belong to Barack Obama. Instead, they have become something more akin to superdelegates. But I think it's safe to say that the vast majority of them will in fact follow their candidate's lead and commit to Barack Obama. 1) A big, big win in Kentucky next Tuesday. Ideally, Obama should be limited to no more than 100 votes. 2) Oregon, scheduled for the same day, inexplicably breaks off and sinks into the Pacific Ocean. 3) Puerto Rico, clocking in on June 1, not only gives Clinton a huge majority, but also manages to become a state in advance of the vote. 4) Finally, on June 3 as the South Dakota polls open, Thomas Jefferson’s head on Mount Rushmore comes to life and starts shouting, “You go, girl.” An ambitious scenario, true. But nothing less than we’ve come to expect from the most hard-working political family in American history.
One upshot of this is that Obama appears to be on track to clinch a pledged delegate majority next Tuesday under all credible Michigan/Florida scenarios:
The worst of these scenarios for Obama is Scenario D -- Michigan and Florida are seated fully, with Obama getting Michigan's uncommitted delegates. Under this scenario, Obama needs 60 pledged delegates to clinch, whereas he projects to pick up about 47 in next Tuesday's primaries. So, that would leave him 13 short. But, he'd only need to pick up 13 of the 32 Edwards delegates between now and then to make up the difference -- remember, the number of Edwards delegates goes up if we count Florida. Four of those 32 Edwards delegates are effectively off the table, since they're tied up at the Iowa state conventions, but picking up 13 of the remaining 28 -- fewer than half -- would seem to be a given.
What about an overall pledged delegate majority? Let's make a couple of assumptions here. Firstly, let's say that my pledged delegate projections in the table above are correct, and that Obama adds 88 pledged delegates from this point onward (and Clinton gets 101). Secondly, let's assign 13 of the 19 Edwards delegates to Obama, 2 to Clinton, and leave his 4 Iowa delegates uncommitted. Thirdly, lets assign the 43 remaining add-on delegates (excluding Michigan) to the candidate who won their state; that would mean 25 delegates for Obama and 18 for Clinton.Current Pledged Delegates 1602
By this math, Obama presently has 1889.5 pledged delegates, and projects to have 2015.5 in mid-June, by the time the primaries are completed and after all add-on delegates are selected. That would leave him just 9.5 superdelegates short of a clinch. He might pick up that many by Friday.
Current Superdelegates 287.5
------------------------------------
Current Total 1889.5
Projected Pledged Delegates 88
Projected Edwards Delegates 13
Projected Add-On Delegates 25
-----------------------------------
Projected June Total 2015.5
Needed to Win 2025
Magic Number 9.5
Superdelegates Outstanding* 192
Percent Needed to Clinch 5%
* Excluding Add-Ons
What about if Florida and Michigan are seated? Let's take Obama's worst Florida/Michigan scenario, Scenario D, and also assume that Florida and Michigan superdelegates get a full vote. This puts 13 additional Edwards delegates on the table; we'll assign 10 more of those to Obama and the other 3 to Clinton.Current Pledged Delegates 1602
Under this scenario, Obama presently has 2019.5 total delegates, and projects to get up to 2155.5 between his share of the Edwards delegates, the add-ons, and the remaining elected delegates. That would leave him 53.5 superdelegates short of the 2209 he'd need to clinch. If Florida and Michigan are included, there are 224 outstanding superdelegates, not counting add-ons, meaning that Obama needs about 25 percent of the remaining total.
Current Superdelegates 287.5
FL/MI Pledged Delegates 122
FL/MI Superdelegates 8
------------------------------------
Current Total 2019.5
Projected Pledged Delegates 88
Projected Edwards Delegates 23
Projected Add-On Delegates 25
-----------------------------------
Projected June Total 2155.5
Needed to Win 2209
Magic Number 53.5
Superdelegates Outstanding* 224
Percent Needed to Clinch 24%
* Excluding Add-Ons
Let's reiterate the most important numbers. If the Edwards delegates, the add-ons, and the remaining pledged delegates fall reasonably in line with expectations:
Obama needs only about 10 more superdelegates to clinch if Florida and Michigan are not seated.
Obama needs only about 55 more superdelegates to endorse him -- about a quarter of the remaining total -- if Florida and Michigan are fully seated according to Clinton's wishes.
Only a DEFCON 1 type of meltdown will prevent Obama from getting the nomination at this point.
EDIT: Or, if you prefer, there is Gail Collins' scenario:Given the Democratic Party’s innovative method of doling out delegates, all that’s necessary for her to snatch the nomination is:
Wednesday, May 14, 2008
Delegate Scenarios, Edwards Edition
Multiple Choice
Team Obama touts a big endorsement at 7 PM. The endorsement is:
a. John Edwards
b. Al Gore
c. Roger Clinton
d. A cheap way to buy out a media cycle
More seriously, I figure the pecking order looks something like this:
1. Hillary Clinton
2. Al Gore
3. Colin Powell
4. John Edwards
5. Prominent Senator or Governor who had endorsed Clinton
6. AFL-CIO
7. Chuck Hagel
8. (tie). Nancy Pelosi and Jimmy Carter*
9. Jim Webb
10. (tie) Brian Schweitzer and Steve Beshear
* Points deducted because of their tacit endorsements already.
Keep in mind that the last two times the Obama campaign teased a "big" endorsement, they turned out to be Lincoln Chafee and Joe Andrew, who would rank about 493rd and 88th on this list respectively.
EDIT: I have no idea whether it's John Edwards. But remember the two contradictory viewpoints that I expressed last night. On the one hand, the Obama campaign knows that the 48 hours following West Virginia were going to be the most vulnerable time in the remainder of the primary cycle for them. So it would be a good time to hijack a media cycle. But, on the other hand, it would be a little awkward to roll out an "in your face" sort of endorsement the day after Clinton won a primary by 40 points. If, I don't know, Dianne Feinstein flipped to Obama, that might trigger exactly the opposite of its intended effect amongst her supporters (see also: the NARAL endorsement). So what you're going for is awe rather than shock.
John Edwards is perhaps the only name that can deliver awe without shock. And that's because, if you look at his appearances on Morning Joe and Larry King Live, he's been softening the ground on a potential Obama endorsement for about a week now. And he deferred to Clinton until after the North Carolina primary and Obama won that primary. It's an endorsement that would gather lots of headlines, but that wouldn't give the appearance of being hasty or presumptuous.
A landmark, of sorts
Strategic Vision releases a Georgia poll that has a McCain-Obama matchup listed (Obama trails by 14) -- but not McCain-Clinton.
EDIT: I have to do some reprogramming since the macros that generate the charts and graphs aren't set up to deal with a situation where just one candidate gets polled. So, there might be a delay in getting this poll integrated into the averages. But we'll keep running Clinton numbers until/unless she withdraws.
Hillary's Oregon Problem
Oregon is a uniquely convenient state for Barack Obama to have as a firewall. It's not really the state's demographics -- which are, statistically speaking, very white and relatively working class (Oregon is below the national average in per capita income). Rather, it's the fact that all of Oregon's voting is conducted by mail.
EDIT: I've been giving out some bad information in this thread. It occurs to me that Oregon has a Republican primary too, so that's why some of the numbers seemed so high. Certain passages have been corrected.
As of yesterday, the state had already received 360,219 ballots. We don't know precisely how many of those are Republican ballots and how many are Democratic ballots, but I'd guess that over half of them are Democratic ballots; perhaps somewhere in the 200,000 range. That's out of about 800,000 registered Democrats in the state, and total turnout that should fall somewhere in the range of 600,000. And these are only the ballots that have been received; ballots are coming in at a rate of about 80,000 per day. Oregonians can't afford to procrastinate, by the way, because a ballot must be received by election day -- the postmark doesn't matter (although there are special drop-boxes available on election day itself).
So let's say there's some big event that takes place over the weekend and swings momentum toward Clinton. It won't matter, but for the small percentage of Oregonians who use the drop-box option (in 2004, about 13 percent of the primary ballots were received on election day itself, or about 29 percent of the total returned). For all intents and purposes, the election in Oregon is about two-thirds over. That's why Barack Obama is campaigning in Michigan today; the election is literally in the (mail)bag.
EDIT #1: Here's something else kind of fun: the final appeal made by each candidate in the Oregon Voter's Pamphlet.
Clinton hits you over the head with resume and facts, whereas Obama's approach is less prosaic. If the two candidates were in college together, you could imagine Clinton getting really mad at Obama because she spent days working on her paper, and he whipped his together that morning and wound up with the better grade.
The Early Bird still got the Worm
If you're Indiana or West Virginia, you're probably feeling pretty good right now. Your usually-irrelevant primary just got a week's worth of national attention, and you had Democrats criss-crossing you from border to border. But guess what? You'd still rather be Iowa.
Below is a listing of the number of events that were scheduled in each state by one of the two leading Democratic candidates, as according to the Washington Post candidate tracker. A caution: there is no such thing as an official register of events, and one of the campaigns (Hillary Clinton's) tends to be much more aggressive than the other about publishing their schedule, including events run by the EX-POTUS or the DOTEXPOTUS. Nevertheless, this will have to suffice.
The number of events is divided by the number of delegates that were at stake in that contest. There were, for example, 2.52 events for every delegate in Nevada, but just 0.12 for every one in New Mexico.
It would probably be more useful to sort these in the order that the primaries took place:
Iowa and New Hampshire absolutely blow everything else way, with more than 7 candidate visits per delegate -- and that's not even counting all the mileage accumulated in those states by candidates who since dropped from the race. And the next two states on the docket, Nevada and South Carolina, were well ahead of anything that came afterward, although Indiana came somewhat close. The Super Tuesday states, on the other hand, collectively screwed themselves over.
If we were doing this more scientifically, we might need to account for some kind of diminishing returns. Barack Obama's 12th visit to Bettendorf, Iowa probably wasn't going to make as much difference as his first. Nevertheless, there is a huge benefit to going early, which is why Michigan and Florida gambled (and lost). On a per-delegate basis, there was about 11 times as much candidate attention paid to Nevada as to California.
Two Wrongs make a Right?
I still think the Obama campaign made a mistake by not making more of a pretense of competing in West Virginia. It's not like we're talking about his having to ride a bicycle from Wheeling to Bluefield. Simply bookending his Monday appearances with a Thursday rally at UWV in Morgantown might have made a lot of difference from a perception standpoint. Obama lost a net of about 6 points in his overall margin based on voters who made up their minds in the last week, and while most of those folks would probably have gravitated toward Clinton in the end, Obama could perhaps have cut 10,000 votes or so off Clinton's margin. There's also the issue that looking as though you're giving up on a state simply doesn't look very presidential.
After seeing Clinton's media coverage, however, I'm not so certain. Here's a fairly fairly typical example from CQ Politics:Hillary Rodham Clinton won a convincing but perhaps anticlimactic victory Tuesday in West Virginia’s presidential primary, which she hopes will revive her campaign’s faint prospects for overtaking Barack Obama .
Or, simply look at the first graf in the Associated Press wire story:
With 81 percent of precincts reporting at 11:20 p.m. eastern time, Clinton led Obama by 67 percent to 26 percent in West Virginia, a state where the underlying demographics had pointed to a huge Clinton victory. Former North Carolina Sen. John Edwards , who withdrew from the race in January but appeared on the ballot, had 7 percent.
The only suspense about the race was the size of Clinton’s margin of victory, which pre-primary polls had pegged as larger than 30 percentage points. West Virginia is overwhelmingly white and rural, and it is older and poorer than most of the rest of the states. Clinton has been polling strongly among voters in these demographic groups. Obama, who has been doing better among upper-income white voters and in urban centers that have ample African-American voters, all but conceded West Virginia to Clinton.
Clinton was poised to win all of West Virginia’s 55 counties. She racked up her largest vote percentages in the state’s 3rd District, which includes hardscrabble coal country and is represented by Democrat Nick J. Rahall II , who endorsed Obama.
Clinton can only hope that she gets a boost from the West Virginia result disproportionate to the small state’s meager influence in the delegate math. Just 28 pledged Democratic delegates were at stake in West Virginia, and Clinton’s victory — perhaps by 19-9 — will made only a slight dent in Obama’s lead among that group. Obama last week passed Clinton in the votes of unpledged “superdelegates” and has expanded his lead since then. Clinton has been trying to convince superdelegates that she’s a stronger general election candidate against John McCain , the presumed GOP nominee.CHARLESTON, W.Va. (AP) -- Hillary Rodham Clinton coasted to a large but largely symbolic victory in working-class West Virginia on Tuesday, handing Barack Obama one of the worst defeats of the campaign yet scarcely slowing his march toward the Democratic presidential nomination.
It's not like you can really call the boldfaced passages "spin", as they have the advantage of being factual. But up until now, this is not how the mainstream media had by and large been framing the race. Yes, MSNBC and the blogs had been -- but not the Associated Press. So perhaps the Obama campaign was not too quick to play the "inevitability card" after all, if it helped their preferred media narrative to sink in.
On the other hand, I suspect things may not have played out this way if not for a couple of significant mistakes that the Clinton campaign made. The first was Hillary Clinton's "hard-working" commentary to USA Today, and the second was Bill Clinton's proclamation that Clinton could win the primary by 60 points. What the former did was to take the sacred concept of the Democrats as the party of the working class and to make it profane, while the latter raised expectations so much as to be almost insulting. It was almost like Bill was saying: wait until the rest of the country gets a load of these rubes. By opening West Virginia's kimono in this way, the Clintons made it more difficult for the media to continue to suspend their disbelief about the viability of their campaign.
p.s. Not all of Clinton's press is bad. She got the kind of write-up she needed to in the Boston Globe, for instance.
Tuesday, May 13, 2008
Clinton wins West Virginia
I'm not planning on extensive coverage tonight, but we'll leave this thread up as a placeholder.
9:44 PM.. On second thought, I think the optics might look a little strange if Obama rolled out a big name superdelegate tomorrow. I don't think he wants to create the perception that he's trying to push her out of the race. On the other hand, Obama's media narrative is not all that bad tonight considering Clinton's margin of victory, he picked up a good talking point with Travis Childers' win in Mississippi, and his polling has looked good in Oregon. So, there's really not a whole lot to be lost simply by waiting for a week. But I do think we'll see a continued stream of not-so-big-name superdelegates toward Obama, in order to steal a few headlines.
Also, Clinton now has 77.5% of the two-way vote in WV-3. It looks like she will get that fifth delegate.
9:17 PM.. Clinton now has 76.8% of the two-way vote in WV-3.
8:56 PM.. As of about 15 minutes ago, I had it:
Clinton 31540 (66.8% of two-way vote), Obama 15661 in CD-1
Clinton 23491 (65.2%), Obama 12541 in CD-2
Clinton 16668 (73.8%), Obama 5914 in CD-3
So, it looks like it will come down to the wire as to whether Clinton picks up the 5th delegate from CD-3.
8:17 PM. In its polite, if somewhat perfunctory tone as well as in its substance, this really really sounds like a speech made by a woman with her eyes on the Vice Presidency.
7:52 PM. Among Democrats and independents who voted in this primary, 53 percent say they'd vote for Obama in November, as compared with 27 percent for McCain, and 17 percent who would sit out. That doesn't sound very good for Obama. But a SurveyUSA poll in February had him winning West Virginia Democrats just 48-39. Granted, that poll also had him losing West Virgina by 18 points. But because more than half of the West Virginia electorate identifies as Democrat, a candidate could tolerate a defection rate as high as 25 percent and still compete in the state.
7:05 PM. Exit polls imply a spread of 65-32-3 for Clinton. But, as any of you who read this blog regularly should know, the exit polls have tended to overestimate Barack Obama's support. That wasn't the case in Indiana or North Carolina, and it's possible that Edison-Mitofsky changed their methodology -- we'll know soon enough.
The two things to watch are turnout and the disposition of WV-3. The exit polls have Clinton winning Southwestern West Virginia, which should overlap heavily with WV-3, by a margin of 70-26. That's 73 percent of the two-way (Obama + Clinton) vote, so she'll need to outperform those exits by just a couple of points to hit 75 percent and take a fifth delegate from the district. WV-1 appears that it should definitely go 4-2 for Clinton. There's an outside chance that Obama can salvage a 3-3 split in WV-2 -- he performed comparatively well in Charleston -- but he will probably lose too many votes in the more rural parts of that district.
It occurs to me that my model may have underestimated turnout -- but not for the reason that it had been before. The issue is that we estimate turnout as a percentage of the Kerry vote. But in West Virginia, there are a lot of Democrats who did not vote for John Kerry (nor for Al Gore). Specifically, 30 percent of West Virginian Democrats voted for George W. Bush in 2004, which I'm pretty sure is the highest figure in the country. If Clinton has turned out those lapsed Democrats -- and she's the sort of candidate who can -- the turnout may beat our expectations.
Back-of-envelope
Halperin says that 17 percent of West Virginians think that Clinton should drop from the race.
If everyone who believed this was an Obama supporter, and 60 percent of Obama's supporters believed this, that would imply that Obama got about 28 percent of the votes.
Anyway, there are few silver linings for Obama in the exit polling data, and there are a lot of talking points that will frustrate his campaign for a couple of days. As I've said before, the best thing the campaign could do would be to change the subject by rolling out some particularly interesting superdelegate endorsements tomorrow.
UPDATE: Okay, we can do some better back-of-envelope stuff. Clinton won the commander-in-chief question 68/29. The AP data I linked to above says that about 1 in 10 Obama supporters said that Clinton would make the better commander-in-chief, whereas "very few" Clinton supporters said that of Obama.
If we assume that 2 percent of Obama's commander-in-chief points came from Clinton voters, that leaves 27 percent that came from Obama voters. If 27 percent represents 90 percent of Obama's support, that means he got about 30 percent of the state's vote.
West Virginia Preview: Clinton by 39 points, 105,000 votes
Since Washington, DC earned its first electoral votes in 1964, no Democrat has won the White House without carrying that jurisdiction. And yet, Hillary Clinton lost the District's primary by 52 points. How can she claim to be electable if she can't win in the most reliably Democratic Congressional District in the country?
There is a lot of flawed logic on both sides heading into the West Virginia primary. The fact is that Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama appeal to very different, and in fact somewhat opposite constituencies. As a result, there have been a number of Congressional Districts throughout the primaries in which one Democrat got absolutely clobbered by the other one.
Following are the worst-performing districts among the primary states in my database for each of Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton. These are the candidate's head-to-head vote shares against one another, ignoring any votes for John Edwards and other candidates.Worst Obama Districts
There are 312 Congressional Districts in my database. These are all the primary states that have released their vote totals by Congressional District. Of those 312 CDs, there are 23 in which Barack Obama received less than 30 percent of the two-way vote (meaning he lost to Clinton by at least 40 points). And there are 21 in which Hillary Clinton received less than 30 percent of the two-way vote. Lopsided results in individual Congressional Districts are nothing new; this has been taking place since the very beginning of the primary campaign.
State CD Obama
Tennessee 4 20.9%
Arkansas 1 21.4%
Florida 19 21.4%
Alabama 4 23.8%
Arkansas 3 24.0%
California 34 24.8%
California 38 25.0%
Oklahoma 2 25.4%
California 32 25.6%
Pennsylvania 12 27.3%
Worst Clinton Districts
State CD Clinton
Illinois 2 12.5%
Illinois 1 13.0%
Illinois 7 15.3%
Virginia 3 19.5%
North Carolina 12 21.0%
Mississippi 2 22.5%
Pennsylvania 2 22.6%
South Carolina 6 22.8%
Alabama 7 23.1%
Georgia 13 23.2%
To some extent these advantages and disadvantages will carry into the general election, and to some extent they will not. The problem for Barack Obama is that West Virginia has only three Congressional Districts. All of them are quite similar to one another. And they are also quite similar to some of the worst-performing districts you see on the list above. PA-12, which ranks 10th on his list, shares a border with West Virginia. So do OH-6, where he received 27.6 percent of the two-way vote, PA-18, where he received 34.3 percent, and VA-9, where he received 35.2 percent.
Barack Obama is going to get absolutely clobbered by Hillary Clinton tonight. But unless Clinton's margin is really extraordinary -- or Obama keeps it closer than expected -- this won't really tell us anything new. No, Barack Obama won't carry West Virginia against John McCain. And yes, Hillary Clinton very well might. But this has been an open secret since at least February, when SurveyUSA polling showed Barack Obama trailing John McCain by 18 in West Virginia, and Hillary Clinton leading him by 5. Obama can draw a pretty good electoral map without West Virginia, just as Clinton can draw a good one without Colorado.
I had noticed that my model had tended to overpredict Obama's performance in West Virginia type of districts. So I did some digging for additional relationships in the data, and came across a couple of new variables as a result. Let me describe those briefly here.
"Gay" is the percentage of households in that district that are occupied by same-sex partners. The Census Bureau does not track data on sexual orientation, but it does ask for the relationship status of all adults in the household, so this is the next best thing. Barack Obama performs better in districts with a higher number of same-sex partner households. This might seem counterintuitive, because Clinton, and not Obama, has tended to perform better with gay voters themselves. But it's not the gay voters that are the important factor, so much as the neighborhoods in which they live. Richard Florida has found that this variable serves as a proxy for a whole number of other things, such as tolerance, and the presence of high-tech and "creative class" industries. It also appears to be a proxy for Obama's support.
"HHI" is average household income. The conventional wisdom is that Obama tends to perform better in districts with higher incomes. While this is partially true, there is a complicated relationship between income and education levels. Barack Obama tends to perform very well in highly educated districts with low-to-moderate incomes -- think for example your typical college town, or urban hipster enclave, or the entire state of Vermont. But his performance is only average in wealthier districts with average education levels. This is captured quite well in another Richard Florida invention, the "Bohemian Index", which is essentially the ratio between education levels and income. So we've introduced HHI to the model, but also the Bohemian Index to account for this interaction.
"Veteran" is the share of military veterans in the population. Barack Obama actually overperforms among veterans. This is hard to perceive unless you look at the data at a fairly granualar level, because veterans tend to be older, and Obama otherwise performs poorly with older voters. But veterans are a hidden strength of his, perhaps because of his opposition to the War in Iraq or his presence on the Veterans' Affairs committee. Whether this strength will carry over to the general election against John McCain, I don't know.
I've also re-introduced the "Americans" variable -- the percentage of adults who identify their ancestry on the Census simply as "American", and accounted for added an interaction term between "Americans" and black voters. The effect of the Americans variable tends to be the most profound in districts where there are fewer black voters.
Finally, I am accounting for the number of appearances that each candidate has made in the state in the 30 days prior to the election, using New York Times data as it appears to be a little bit more reliable than the data source I was using before. There is definitely some danger to a candidate who blows off a state. For example, Barack Obama made 20 appearances in South Carolina to Hillary Clinton's 9, whereas Clinton made 11 appearances in California to Obama's 4. We know which way each of those states tended to break at the end.
Onward to the Congressional Districts:
CD-1: North/Wheeling. The oldest and whitest of West Virginia's three districts, WV-1 shares quite a bit in common with PA-12, where Obama received just 27 percent of the two-way vote. We're projecting a similar showing for him here. The only saving grace for Obama is that it's arguably the least Appalachian district, as it has the lowest percentage of "Americans" and the highest percentage of WASPs. In all three West Virginia districts, the question will be whether Clinton can get the 75 percent of the two-way vote she'd need to earn a 5-1 delegate split. The model doesn't quite have it happening in this one, but it will be very close. Projection: Clinton 66.9, Obama 29.1; Clinton 4-2 Delegate Split.
Forgot to mention: I am reserving 4 percent of the popular vote for John Edwards, which was his standing in the most recent Suffolk
poll. We did not have to worry about Edwards in Pennsylvania, North Carolina or Indiana, as he was not on the ballot there. But he is in West Virginia, and in fact he is featured quite prominently:
What's a little bit unusual about the West Virginia ballot is that it lists each candidate's hometown. Something tells me that the guy from Chapel Hill, North Carolina is going to pick off a few late-deciders from the candidates from Chicago and Chappaqua. Edwards got 4.5 percent of the vote in Tennessee -- he actually beat Obama in a handful of rural counties there -- and he can probably expect to do similarly here.
CD-2: Central / Charleston. West Virginia doesn't have any cities of significant size, but WV-2 is the closest that it comes to urban, as it has by far the highest incomes in the state (though still well below the national average). If Obama had made more of an effort in West Virginia, he might have had a chance to salvage a 3-3 delegate split here. Since he didn't make that effort, his consolation prize is that he probably doesn't have to be worried about losing a fifth delegate to Clinton. Projection: Clinton 64.8, Obama 31.2; Clinton 4-2 Delegate Split.
CD-3: South / Beckley. There are whole pockets of WV-3 that are as poor (and poorly-educated) as can be found in the United States. The only thing separating Obama from total oblivion is the large-by-West-Virginia-standards 4 percent African-American vote. Obama will need to turn that vote out in order to avoid a 5-1 delegate split for Clinton, but this is extremely vulnerable territory for him. Projection: Clinton 70.8, Obama 25.2; Clinton 4-2 Delegate Split.
We are projecting a margin of 39 points and approximately 105,000 popular votes for Hillary Clinton. The statewide and PLEO delegates will almost certainly be split 5-2 and 2-1 respectively. Obama will either salvage 7, 8 or 9 delegates from West Virginia depending whether WV-1 and WV-3 flip a fifth delegate to Clinton.
I have also slightly revised my turnout model. As Dick Bennett has kindly pointed out, my model had tended to underestimate turnout in the last couple of primaries. The trick is that Democratic primary turnout has tended to increase as the identity of John McCain as the Republican nominee has become known. The way I've worked around this is to apply John McCain's standing in the Real Clear Politics Republican nomination average on the morning of each Democratic primary. As McCain's position has improved -- meaning that his nomination became more and more certain -- more people have voted in the Democratic primaries.
EDIT: The paragraph that follows originally had stated that West Virginia has a closed primary. It does not; it has a semi-open ("modified") primary, as did North Carolina, in which independents may vote but Republicans may not. Fortunately, my model itself had West Virginia correctly specified as an open primary, so the projections have not been affected. But I have changed the text that follows.
On the other hand, another factor is that there has been relatively little campaign activity in the state, particularly from Barack Obama. And from what the model can gather, Obama activity is a more important determinant of turnout than Clinton activity. While it would not surprise me if there were fairly high turnout as sort of a big F.U. to Barack Obama -- remember what I wrote before about what happens to a candidate when he is perceived as blowing off a state -- we ought to expect less enthusiasm than in North Carolina and Indiana. Moreover, West Virginia has an extremely small share of independent voters, so while West Virginia has a semi-open primary in theory, it may be closer to a closed primary in practice.
Overall, we are projecting turnout
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