Saturday, February 16, 2008

Clinton's ill-advised campaign approach

Eric Kleefeld make some interesting observations here, noting that a winner-take-all system of delegate allocation would be benefiting Hillary Clinton. Of course, that's not the system Democrats compete under, so it's weird that her campaign seems to be acting as if it is.
In the race as it's played out, [Obama's] approach leading up to Super Tuesday was to keep the margins close in big states where he was having trouble, and then to run up the score in smaller states where Hillary wasn't really trying to compete. [...] In a way, it almost seems like the Hillary campaign was running as if the Dems did WTA primaries, while the Obama camp was running to maximize their strengths under the proportional system.
It is odd that a campaign with as much money and organization as Clinton's just decided to write off so many states. From my experiences and those with whom I spoke after the Colorado caucuses, there was really not much of a Clinton presence here. Yes, granted, Bill and Chelsea Clinton spoke in Denver shortly before the caucuses, and that ain't nothing. But the Obama campaign had volunteers trained in running caucuses at every single precinct. More of an effort in CO and other caucus states could have yielded Hillary a few more delegates, and it's looking now like every delegate counts.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

I'm not convinced Hillary's camp could have done much more in the caucus states. Hillary's support is among the elite (superdelegates) and the electorate (voters in the primary states). Obama's main support lies in between, with the low-level self-described party activists. Those are caucus people, and yes, Obama needed to organize them to get them, but since he did, it would have been a waste of Clinton's resources to try to counter that.