Nevada Results: Was Obama the Real Winner?

Posted by Joshua Holland, AlterNet at 4:05 AM on January 19, 2008.

Update: Ari Melber, writing on The Nation's blog:

Barack Obama may have won the most delegates in Saturday's Nevada Caucus, even though Hillary Clinton bested his statewide turnout by about six points.

A source with knowledge of the Nevada Democratic Party's projections told The Nation that under the arcane weighting system, Obama would win 13 national convention delegates and Clinton would win 12 delegates. The state party has not released an official count yet.

[Snip]

UPDATE: The Obama Campaign is now pushing hard to promote this delegate victory. The campaign is convening a post-caucus conference call for reporters -- something that only winning campaigns usually do -- and circulating numerous Clinton quotes about how delegates are the only thing that matter.

There's an added layer of complexity: similar to Iowa's caucus system, there's a labyrinthine process -- with county caucuses coming up -- before Nevada's 25 actual delegates to the Democratic convention are officially determined sometime in April.

Nevada also has 8 "super-delegates" -- Dem party officials and other insiders who can remain uncommitted until the convention.

Those super-delegates, by the way, will be about 20 percent of the total at the convention in Denver. They're important -- we wouldn't want voters having too much say over the nominating process. Last I heard, Clinton was leading among committed Democratic super-delegates by about 2-1 nationwide, but that was before Iowa, and about half of the total said at the time that they weren't yet supporting any candidate.

***

With 74 percent of caucuses reporting, CNN has called Nevada for Hillary:

Clinton 51%
Obama 45%
Edwards 4%

According to the entrance polls, the vote was very much divided by race:

Whites: Clinton 52%, Obama 34%
African Americans: Clinton 14%, Obama 83%
Latinos: Clinton 64%, Obama 26%

And by gender, but to a lesser degree:

Men: Clinton 43%, Obama 45%
Women: Clinton 51%, Obama 38%

We also saw a split by age similar to that seen in Iowa and New Hampshire, with Clinton winning voters over 45 by a healthy margin and Obama winning by a similar margin among younger voters.

The polls were off again -- the one conducted by Zogby for Reuters and C-Span (which was the latest poll in the field) came closest; others weren't even in the right neighborhood. I wonder if we're at the end of an era in terms of political polling.

There's a lot that can be said about the state of the polling industry. To some extent I think what's happening is that those little snapshots of voters' sentiments at a given point in time are less valuable in the context of today's 24-second news cycle. A news story can reach and move a large number of voters in that environment, and blogs, social networking sites and other new forms of communication are allowing people to influence each other in a way that we didn't see in past generations. I think we may have a lot of surprising results before pollsters come up with some new models that might capture those kinds of swings better than their established methods have done recently.

Tagged as: clinton, obama, election08, nevada

Joshua Holland is an editor and senior writer at AlterNet.