The Big Picture

On Mach 14, I looked at what Obama and Clinton each needed to get out of Election Day in Pennsylvania:

[Clinton] must-win by a large margin.  Obama currently leads Clinton by somewhere between 100 and 150 delegates and he leads in popular vote by over 800,000.  Pennsylvania is the last great chance for Clinton, but in order to cut Obama’s popular vote lead by even just half, she will need to win about 65% of the state’s popular vote, and in order to cut his delegate lead by 50, she will need to win pledged delegates 104 to 54.

It appears that Clinton won the state with just by about 9%, she picked up about 200,000 more voters than Obama, and she’s currently picked up about 12 delegates (though that will probably shrink to about 9, once all of the delegates are assigned).  It’s a clear win for her and a respectable margin, however she fell far short of what she needed to do to make a real dent in Obama’s lead.

What did Obama need to accomplish?

He needs to keep the statewide popular vote close by running up his vote in Philadelphia and running respectably in the rest of the state.  A real test for him will be to see how well he does among working-class white voters in the West, high income voters in the inner and outer suburbs of Philadelphia, and among Latinos in the Eastern side of the state.  Finally, the Obama campaign needs to prevent a win here by Clinton from being framed as the continuation of a “see-saw” battle.

Obama did manage to keep the vote close in many regions, but by taking only 65% of Philadlphia, and with turnout more than 100,000 votes lower than the 2004 General Election Kerry vote, he did not run the vote up as much as he might have hoped in Philly.  Clinton took most of Western PA, though Obama won the City of Pittsburgh 58%-42%, more than many predicted.  Results were mixed in Philadelphia’s suburbs, with Obama taking Delaware and Chester, and Clinton taking Montgomery and Bucks.  On the day of the election, most news reports were noting that Obama was not expecting to win, so the campaign did a good job of managing expectations.

Clinton made small gains, but both candidates are already on to Indiana and North Carolina, where those gains will either be erased or will grow a little more.