Clintons Looking in All the Wrong Places
February 19th, 2008 at 2:45 pm
Last week Bill Clinton was in Amarillo and Lubbock. This week he goes to Midland-Odessa and San Angelo. Let’s call it the Buddy Holly tour. No offense to West Texas but we have to wonder about the campaign’s rationale for focusing so much attention on places with few delegates and fewer Democrats. Sure, there’s a high concentration of blue-collar voters, a Clinton target group, but as a strategy it just doesn’t make a whole lot of sense.
To wit: There are 126 delegates at stake in the primary, but you ain’t gonna find many of them out west. State Senate District 31 (Amarillo and Midland-Odessa) has just two, the fewest of the 31 senate districts. Moreover, a 50-50 split of the delegates here (one to Obama, one to Clinton) is virtually guaranteed. District 28 (Lubbock and San Angelo) isn’t much better with three delegates. The best a candidate could hope for here would be a 2-1 split on delegates. Together, these two districts constitute just 4 percent of the 126 delegates up for grabs in the primary.
As for the caucuses, the two senate districts have a little less than 4 percent of the state total, according to an Observer analysis. Travis County alone, where Austin is located, has twice as many. So, why is the Clinton campaign wasting time and energy hunting for delegates in places where there aren’t many? If it’s to beef up the popular vote margin, there are probably more Democrats in three blocks of Houston than in most of West Texas.
One clue to the Clintons’ cluelessness may be that until recently they didn’t know a thing about the peculiarities of the Texas primary system. Yesterday the Washington Post reported:
Several top Clinton strategists and fundraisers became alarmed after learning of the state’s unusual provisions during a closed-door strategy meeting this month, according to one person who attended.
What Clinton aides discovered is that in certain targeted districts, such as Democratic state Sen. Juan Hinojosa’s heavily Hispanic Senate district in the Rio Grande Valley, Clinton could win an overwhelming majority of votes but gain only a small edge in delegates. At the same time, a win in the more urban districts in Dallas and Houston — where Sen. Barack Obama expects to receive significant support — could yield three or four times as many delegates.
