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Thursday, March 06, 2008

Plenty of reaction the the Clinton resurgence:

Dan Payne says Clinton shows her chutzpah.

Party officials mull a possible do-over in Florida and Michigan.

Clinton's success on Tuesday alters the delegate race dynamic, and her people are looking at the math and the map as they try to chart a course to the nomination.

David Broder is pleased that the race is a cliffhanger, but that's because he is a political journalist who loves a good story.

Harold Meyerson is a more of an ideologue, and as such he is doing some hand-wringing over how the race is going.

Bob Novak explains why Clinton isn't dead.

As for my own reaction to the results from Tuesday night, I had thought that Clinton was on the way out. If Obama had won in Texas and Clinton eked out only a narrow win in Ohio she certainly would have been approached by party leaders to ask her to get out. Now any justification for that approach is out. She and her people can plausibly point to several factors, including her ability to win the big states the party will need to prevail in November, and the fact that Obama seems to be wilting in the heat as the spotlight is turned on him more directly, as important reasons why she should be the nominee. Her problem, of course, is the math. Yesterday I spent some time working with Slate's delegate calculator and I found that no matter how I worked the math of the upcoming contests (excluding Florida and Michigan, which may yet be heard from) neither candidate was able to win the nomination with pledged delegates. If Obama won all the remaining contests 70%-30%, he would still fall 228 delegates short. Clinton would have to win all of the remaining contests by a greater than 60%-40% margin just to take the lead in pledged delegates and, of course, it would still not be enough to win without superdelegates. Unless someone drops out, this contest is going to the convention.

On another subject, here is an analysis of the Senate races. It differs with mine on some of the individual races, but it shares the same general conclusion, which is that it looks like it will be bad for the GOP, but not as bad as it might have been. Here is another analysis that might be of interest.

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