Obama Still Frontrunner for Nomination

April 23, 2008

The senator from Illinois still leads in the number of pledged delegates and the popular vote. He is almost certain to hold the delegate lead and will probably maintain the popular-vote advantage when the primaries end in early June. Perhaps more important, Clinton's campaign is nearly broke, whereas Obama has an enormous amount of money in the bank to throw into the next two contests and beyond.

... David Plouffe, Obama's campaign manager, said the loss was expected and did little to change the trajectory of a nomination battle that continues to favor his candidate.

"Some states are stronger for our opponent," he said. "Some are stronger for us. We assumed she had an edge there [in Pennsylvania] and we would try to keep it as close as we could. You have to be clear-eyed about that. We have two contests coming up in two weeks. We'll see where the race is after that. . . . The structure of the delegate contest will not be changed appreciably, and that's the most important factor in the race."

By those calculations, Clinton faces an almost insurmountable hurdle. Going into Pennsylvania, Obama had 1,415 pledged delegates to Clinton's 1,251, according to the Associated Press. She led among superdelegates, 258 to 233, but that margin has been shrinking steadily over the past two months. Her victory may prevent a wholesale shift to Obama in the next few weeks, but her task remains daunting.

Obama's team expects to recoup any loss of delegates in Pennsylvania with the results in North Carolina and Indiana. After those, six contests will remain, and the chances of Clinton's winning enough of the remaining delegates to overtake Obama appears out of the question. Even her hope of taking a lead in the popular vote appears out of reach, given that Michigan and Florida will not be counted in the calculations because they violated Democratic Party rules in holding their primaries early.

... One clear bright spot for Obama was the nearly one in 10 voters in the Democratic primary who had recently registered with the party. Pennsylvania experienced a huge shift in voter registration over the past year, with Democratic registration rising by more than 300,000 and Republican registration shrinking by about 70,000.

Among newly registered Democrats voting yesterday, Obama won them by about 20 percentage points. His advisers will point to that as evidence that he can draw support from former independents or even disaffected Republicans in a general-election race against McCain.