The latest Rasmussen Reports telephone survey in Virginia shows Barack Obama leading Hillary Clinton by eighteen percentage points. Obama earns 55% of the vote while Clinton attracts 37%.
Of course, we've seen big polls numbers come crumbling down before, so let's take note and get back to work! Every vote we secure for Obama helps him secure delegates and ensure that Clinton does pull another New Hampshire surprise. Let's make Virginia another wave in Obama's growing momentum -- and let's not get complacent with big poll numbers!
Get fired up Virginia! Yes we can!
57 to 31. He can win this one by big numbers too with the right turnout. If tonight's results swing undecideds, and if independents come out big, 65% isn't out of the question in Maryland.
If she loses Maine, Virginia, and Wisconsin (I think Maryland and DC are slam dunks for Barack), that means she'll be 0-for-9 (0-for-10 if you count the Virgin Islands) since Super Tuesday, and will be 9-for-31 since her pseudo-win in Florida.
It's looking more and more to me like this thing could be over on March 4th if Barack can win in Ohio. Texas actually favors him a bit, because it is a combination caucus/primary deal -- 75% of votes allocated by caucus in an open primary, and then 25% in a caucus event held the same evening for Democrats. Strange, but true.
If Barack can win in Ohio, I think the campaign is over. If there is about a 50/50 delegate split on March 4, I think the campaign probably continues on to Pennsylvania and perhaps beyond.
So, I think if he wins Ohio, even narrowly, that means he'll win Texas, too, thus essentially ending the contest [slightly more breakdown: Texas has a decent sized black population of approx. 12%, that'll account for 20-25% of the Democratic voters; furthermore, Texas is more distinctly western/plains in much of the state than southern, so he should do better with whites than he has did in today's Louisiana primary. He still needs to find a way to improve his outreach to Latinos, obviously a big deal in Texas, where Latinos comprise 36% of the population].
Ohio seems to be a tougher haul, because Hillary has more institutional support there (the Governor), and because Barack has struggled with lower income whites in primaries. Rural Ohio is alot like rural Tennessee, and Barack obviously did not fare well in Tennessee.
This may well be wrong, but that's my intuition. Having lived over a decade in Texas, it just seems to me that the Clintons were not beloved there, and there aren't party machines like in LA and Boston that she can really dominate in. Furthermore, I think Barack will do really well in smaller rural areas in north and west Texas that are in deeply red parts of the state (much more similar to Kansas and Nebraska than anything southern), and he'll clean up in Austin and Central Texas, Dallas, and Houston. East Texas is much more akin to Louisiana, so he'll fare probably poorly in that part of the state among whites. He has shown a remarkable ability to build organizations quickly, so I think he'll be competitive in San Antonio, the Valley, and El Paso.
[I don't know anything about Ohio, except that it has approximately the same percentage of blacks as does Texas.]