Pennsylvania Democratic primary live

This post will be progressively updated to follow the count in the Pennsylvania Democratic primary, starting from when I get out of bed (by which time it might well be all over). Real Clear Politics’ poll average shows a slight narrowing in Hillary Clinton’s lead since last week, from 47.4-40.4 to 49.5-43.4.

11.30am AEST. CNN reports Clinton leads 53-47 with 20 per cent of precincts counted. Their exit poll, if I’m reading it correctly, points to a result of about 52-48. They called it a “win” for Clinton about half an hour ago, for what that’s worth.

12.30pm. Clinton has just given a speech to claim victory of one kind or another: she now leads 54-46 with 75 per cent of precincts reporting.

12.50pm. As Obama gives his speech, the CNN’s count clicks over to 55-45 with 78 per cent of precincts reporting. They are giving Clinton 52 delegates to Obama’s 36 on television, but their web page is holding back on 37-31.

2.20pm. With 98 per cent of precincts reporting, Clinton’s has a lead of 54.8-45.2, which is at the higher end of market expectations.

Author: William Bowe

William Bowe is a Perth-based election analyst and occasional teacher of political science. His blog, The Poll Bludger, has existed in one form or another since 2004, and is one of the most heavily trafficked websites on Australian politics.

1,387 comments on “Pennsylvania Democratic primary live”

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  2. j/v

    #1247

    was wondering who would be the first to see what I did with terms.

    yes the term in #1207 of course is ” ‘pacifist’ and replaces ”peacenik’ everywher

    “pacifist’ being those ‘pacifists’ who are opposed to war of any kind and are anti war”

    Well j/v , you will feel much better to ‘out’ yourself knowing the terminolgy is ok
    and look forward to you surprising me by actually answering the 4 questions or do I expect too much frankness between us friends

  3. Ferny!

    He’s doing it too:

    “How can you possibly have an international agreement that’s effective unless countries like China and India are not full participants?”

    GW Bush, Camp David, April 19, 2008

  4. 1235
    Enemy Combatant Says:
    April 27th, 2008 at 7:22 pm
    “…….Lots have stopped subscribing to MSM organs. The MSM have lost control of “The Message”. Their bottom line and ratings have suffered further…”

    …
    This is no exaggeration. MSM products are in decline and the vicious cycle has begun: falling circulations have prompted cuts in editorial spending (story-getting and writing), leading to declines in product quality and further declines in uptake.

    I wonder where the future lies? In super-thin continuities? What will it mean to be information rich and poor?

    The MSM is opinion dense and truth deprived. Is the blogocracy any better?

  5. NYT: News from Guam …

    Guam Democrats will choose eight delegates, each of whom will get half a vote at the Democratic National Convention. The precinct in Inarajan will vote earlier, on Saturday, because of a conflict with the village fiesta. (Don’t you just hate when your partying gets in the way of your voting?) The results from that contest will be kept confidential until the rest of the voting is done.

    LOL – A collision of democracy and community.

  6. I think pollbludgers should be entitled to at least a half a delegate as well, Catrina. We may have to give up lunch and insults in order to cast our votes, but this would be a small price to pay. Wiliam could be our voice at the convention.

  7. In fact, we could have an online convention and choose our own candidate. In the spirit of intangibility, we could nominate anyone we like. Even ron. Though this would be inviting certain defeat. KR could chair the convention and provide the drinks.

  8. I’ve been busy today and have just caught up with the last few hours of posts, the usual badinage and back and forth, and (given the news cycle in the US seems to stop turning over weekends) very little fresh data. The one thing that stands out, however, is Ron’s further adventure into the land of….Ron.
    Apparently he wants a declaration from various people, including a certain “Robert Boland” that we are not “peaceniks” and love the bomb – sort of a loyalty oath to the nuclear shield which protects our “families”.
    Well I’m sorry Ron, but I am (though not a pacifist) a fervent and lifelong peacenik (in the old sense of opposing weapons of mass destruction, whoever holds them).
    In any case, I have a family and my wife has actually been bombed. The terrorists who did it killed the family of 16 who lived next door and she witnessed (at the age of five) their blackened bodies, some on the pavement and some hanging from a star fruit tree she used to pick fruit off on her way home from school.
    The terrorist in question wore a uniform. It wasn’t John McCain, as this was during the Christmas bombings of North Vietnam in 1973 and McCain was already in the “Hanoi Hilton” at this time. But it was someone like him. And the evil terrorist mastermind was, of course, that evil terrorist Henry Kissinger, who had already resigned himself to losing the war but was willing to murder any number of “families” in small towns in North Vietnam to get a slightly better (and electorally more sellable) deal at the negotiating table.
    So you’ll excuse the Bollard household if we’re not enthusiastic about the way in which our family is protected by nice uniformed Americans with their nice bombs.

  9. 1257
    blindoptimist

    That’s a great idea, but the chairman does not have to do the drinks as well! LOL

    (Although I’d get through a few with this rabble)

    “In the spirit of intangibility” is a lovely description by the way.

  10. blindoptimist at 1256 and 1257
    Good idea – but I think we can go one better than Guam and divide our delegate into a dozen or so parts and that way we could send this lucid intellectual latte sipping paranoid west-wing schizophrenic – but first off we would need a caucus to select the ultimate delegate mental composition.

  13. ..tips hat to KR…

    We will have to impose a door charge then, KR. I don’t know if I could be sober and still enjoy Ron’s nomination speech…

  17. I spose you’d be the kicker and not the kickee. Still, it might be less painful than getting serious with some of the syntax here..

  20. 1263
    blindoptimist

    Sobriety is optional here, at all times!

    Beffuddlement is in the eye of the beholder, blindoptimist, but I shouldn’t need to tell a blindoptimist that, should I? LOL

  24. Befuddled is a good word, KR. Kind of embraces everything from fatigue to doubt to regret and straightforward misinformed…

  29. I read this earlier too KR. Obama has to stay out of this stuff: he can’t play in the mud and appeal to voters’ better instincts. I’m sure the voters of America know this better than we do, but…it’s a tough way to win…

  31. 1279
    blindoptimist

    It does show what a disreputable character Clinton is, though eh? She knew full well that Rendell had done a deal with Farrakhan in 1997 to get some race problems hosed down, but to use the NOI to beat Obama over the head was utterly disgraceful dogwhistling scumbaggery.

    Clinton reminds me of Howard, funnily enough.

  32. 1280
    Catrina

    Rupert has dumped Hillary.

    It’s time, as they once said, (You probably weren’t there!)

  33. Robert

    #1258

    I am very sorry to have blogged you & hope no harm has been caused given the history. Also I do appreciate the reply.

    By way of clarification , my #1207 blog (which in #1252 I replaced ‘peacenik’ WITH ‘pacifist’) had no sinister intent although some seemed to think so. As there’d been discussion on Iran/nukes , I was simply trying to establish from what view base bloggers were working from (‘pacifist’ vs. the many levels of the definition of ‘peacenik’) so that I did not waste their time or mine debating at 100% cross purposes.

    I shall not direct any future blogs to you on the subject and thanks again for responding

  34. Finnigans @ 1033,
    Agree that the FL and MI debacles are not the fault of the voters.
    Agree that it’s reasonable to count Florida, given that everyone was on the ballot there.
    But surely it’s a bit rich to count Michigan, in which Hillary’s only competition was Mr Nobody??? Bear in mind that all the candidates agreed not to be on the ballot, but HRC reneged.

  35. Fox for Obama? I have to say, I don’t believe it. But you never know. Even Rupert must see how much harm has been inflicted by the loony Republicans. And maybe he wants to sow a bit of confusion: it sells….

  36. Ron – when you get around to arguing your Iran position – you may want to take into account the views of the British House of Lords.

    Responding with understatement to a question in the British House of Lords, the foreign minister responsible for Asia, Lord Mark Malloch-Brown, said of Clinton’s implication of a mushroom cloud over Iran: “While it is reasonable to warn Iran of the consequences of it continuing to develop nuclear weapons and what those real consequences bring to its security, it is probably not prudent in today’s world to threaten to obliterate any other country and in many cases civilians resident in such a country.”

    And just for reference – was anyone here making an argument supporting Hillary Clinton’s foreign policy experience?

  37. Just an update to my 1286 comment:

    The Arab News called Clinton’s nuclear threat “the foreign politics of the madhouse,” saying, “it demonstrates the same doltish ignorance that has distinguished Bush’s foreign relations.”

  38. KR, both Howard and Clinton employ politics of the lowest common denominator. Their style validates Enoch Powell’s bleak observation that in politics, everyone ends a loser.

  39. Catrina, the more bellicose the better, it seems, if you’re Hillary. Hardly what you’d call a nuanced policy stance.

  40. Mornin’ Peuples,

    Chris Masters is reporting on Phenomenon Obi on 4 Corners tonight.
    A smidge from the ABC online blurb:

    “It was Obama’s appeal to educated whites that boosted his momentum among blacks and whites alike – but that’s also a weapon used against him. “The irony is the black candidate has to win the white vote in order to get the black vote,” says conservative African-American scholar Shelby Steele.

    Critics like Steele accuse Obama of cynically trading on white people’s guilt to win their support. Obama tells them they’re not racist, so they embrace him, is the reasoning. The opposite view sees him as a 21st century embodiment of Martin Luther King, who dared to dream of a “promised land”, a post-racial America.”
    http://www.abc.net.au/4corners/content/2008/s2226826.htm

    Here’s a little background on Shelby Steele:

    “Steele has written a short book which contains Steele’s analysis of Barack Obama’s character as a child born to a mixed couple who then has to grow as a black man.[4] Steele then concludes that Barack Obama is a “bound man” to his “black identity.” Steele gives this description of his conclusion:
    “There is a price to be paid even for fellow-traveling with a racial identity as politicized and demanding as today’s black identity. This identity wants to take over a greater proportion of the self than other racial identities do. It wants to have its collective truth-its defining ideas of grievance and protest-become personal truth…. These are the identity pressures that Barack Obama lives within. He is vulnerable to them because he has hungered for a transparent black identity much of his life. He needs to ‘be black.’ And this hunger—no matter how understandable it may be—means that he is not in a position to reject the political liberalism inherent in his racial identity. For Obama liberalism is blackness.”

    Don Wycliff, editor of the Chicago Tribune, reviewed Steele’s book[5] and disagreed with his analysis of Obama noting that:
    “[as] I read his essay, I found myself thinking that Steele was trapped in a time warp, that his knowledge of the currents of thought and attitude among black people stopped sometime around 1990. Less charitably, I found myself thinking that the egregious Al Sharpton is not the only one with an investment in a static view of American race relations….It apparently never occurs to Steele that for a man a generation younger than himself the terms of blackness might be different, that the “totalitarian” demands he [Steele] encountered in the ’60s might no longer prevail, that Barack Obama’s mixed-race experience might actually be different than Shelby Steele’s.”[5]”
    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shelby_Steele

    After the literally hundreds of hours we’ve put in discussing Obi, be interesting to see what sort of a job Masters and crew do. Folks might care to check on their supplies of popcorn before venturing into their local Piggly-Wiggly sto’ today.

    Now…… back to read last night’s PB fare. Glommed a bit during a quick skim about Citizen Rupert having to let Brutusina Strangelove go. Tsk tsk.
    Mind you, with a handle like that she’d be a walk-up-start to become front of house for an upmarket Big Apple B&D joint, or perhaps pick up a few bob on the side (campaign funds are reportedly very tight) at one of the “establishments” that fellow New Yorker and friend, fallen SD and Governor, Eliot “Pants Man” Spitzer, was wont to patronise.

    Desperate times call for desperate measures.

  43. JV at 1247, never surrender a phrase, narry a syllable to the Ministry of Truth. Their Newspeak fosters confusion, then doublethink kicks in and before you know it, the whole gaggle will be blurting doubleplusgood duckspeak to obfuscate The Big Lie.

    BO at 1254: “The MSM is opinion dense and truth deprived. Is the blogocracy any better?”
    Yes, reckon it is, BO, especially when one learns how to draw the best from it. And it’s evolving amazingly fast. If the pen is mightier than the sword, the blogs are better than any “Goebbels” spun word.

    Robert B. at 1258: Superb post. War criminal Kissinger (Tom Lehrer quit doing satire when HK was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize) is the “go to guy” between the Indon govt and the Louisana domiciled multi national Freeport McCord who are ripping the copper and gold from the mountains of West Papua like there are no tomorrows, which of course ther arn’t for for the Meanesian peoples of West Papua who had thei country “annexed” with UN approval in 1969 “Act of Free Choice”. Talk about Orwellian.
    The then Colonel Suharto officiated on behalf of the Javanese in the so called “independence vote” earlier in the sixties. Butchery has been the fate of all locals and some outsiders who have dared to dissent ever since.

  44. Dyno @ 1284. agree you with entirely.

    Both Florida and Michigan were told their votes wouldnt count, and went ahead anyway, so their electors should blame their state parties not the candidates for their votes not counting.

    So counting Florida is dubious at best, but counting Michigan is so desparate as to be ridiculous. But, if the numbers dont say what they are supposed to say, just find a way to make it work (flashbacks of Dennis Shanahan last year)

  45. A small shift in the RCP poll today.

    After bottoming out yesterday at 6.2% ahead of Hillary in the national average, Obama’s lead has widened slightly to 6.6 today having been around 10.5 prior to the PA primary. So there’s still volatility in the polls. The one thing all polls have in common is that Obama holds a comfortable lead. The one exception being a Gallup Tracking poll showing a tie.

    Dyno at 1284: How can it possibly be “reasonable to count Florida” when both candidates agreed not to campaign there (even though Hillary reneged) and the population were told the vote would not count? I hear the argument that it’s not fair to Floridians to declare their Primary null and void. But clearly it doesn’t suddenly make it ‘fair’ to include what is an invalid vote. Such an action would only compound the unfairness as there are many Floridians who would rightly feel defrauded because they chose to stay home having been told the vote would not count.

    Neither FL or MI can be counted by any measure of fairness or electoral justice. The only way to count them is to hold a valid primary. Time has probably run out for this option – though recent MI polling would probably make Obama wish otherwise.

  47. Wallace, on Fox, asked Obama:

    But some observers, and some liberal observers say is that part of your problem is you come off as a former law professor who talks about transforming politics when the lunch bucket crowd really wants to know what you’re going to do for them.

    …and I wonder what the press would have done had Obama called a demographic group ‘the lunch bucket crowd’ so casually?

    He’d be pilloried from coast to coast by the MSM as an ‘elitist’.

    The hypocricy is breathtaking. Make a generalisation, off the cuff, about small town people being ‘bitter’ and they shred you incessantly, but prepare a question for national TV and dismiss an entire segment of the population as the ‘lunch bucket crowd’, well that’s OK, be we are the media, we can do what we like and not be questioned on it.

    By the way, the full transcript is here:

    http://elections.foxnews.com/2008/04/27/transcript-obama-on-fns/

  48. In a long answer about Rev Wright, Obama makes this point:

    People I think noted that, if you run back some of Dr. King’s speeches, we always play “I have a dream,” but if you look at his sermon in Riverside church for example, when he spoke out fiercely against the Vietnam war, there’s some pretty jarring comments there as well. And part of it has to do with a very specific experience, a generation that was raised under Jim Crow, saw a lot of violence, saw a lot of racial discrimination.

    I have a different experience and in part have a much more hopeful vision of where America has been and where it can go in the future.

    …Wright’s career is more than one soundbite, hey, why not condense one man’s life into 15 seconds and then use that to attack another man’s integrity?

    Yeah, that makes perfect sense.

  49. Well KR, it’s no surprise that the GOP intends to “condense one man’s life into 15 seconds and then use that to attack another man’s integrity” in an ad to run in the lead up to the Indiana primary.

    Hillary and the GOP – accidental or deliberate allies against the black kid. 2 on 1 – he likes those odds in basketball; it will be interesting to see how it plays out in Indiana.

    What remains true, for me at least, is that Obama’s integrity remains intact and challenging in spite of the jibber jabber from the Right.

  50. Sorry, i’ve been out of touch for the long weekend…

    What the hell is this ‘Obama is playing the race card?’ business?

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