South Carolina Spin Has Already Started

Posted by Chris Bowers, Open Left at 7:01 AM on January 25, 2008.

Retuning to the horserace for a moment, with the outcome of South Carolina appearing like a foregone conclusion, the Obama and Clinton camps are trying to set expectations on the result. Bill Clinton sets the tone for the Clinton campaign:

"As far as I can tell, neither Senator Obama nor Hillary have lost votes because of their race or gender," he said. "They are getting votes, to be sure, because of their race or gender - that's why people tell me Hillary doesn't have a chance of winning here."

In other words, when Obama wins South Carolina, it will be because of the large African-American population. This is an attempt to minimize the bounce Obama receives from South Carolina by arguing that Clinton never really had much of a chance in the state. However, there is a major problem with this line of reasoning: women will make up a larger percentage of the electorate in South Carolina than African-Americans. In 2004, according to the exit poll, African-Americans were 47% of the South Carolina Democratic primary electorate, while women were 57%. Given this, if Hillary is winning votes based on her gender, then why isn't she winning South Carolina?

For it's part, the Obama campaign is arguing that the Clinton campaign is doing whatever it can to win South Carolina, stating in a public memo that "Hillary Clinton's campaign is pulling out all the stops to win in South Carolina." The idea is to try and maximize the impact of an Obama win by making the contest in South Carolina seem like a knock-down, dragged out fight, rather than a state that Obama won because Clinton more or less ignored it. The problem with this line of reasoning is that only a couple days ago Obama said the following:

I think the South Carolina voters will have to make an assessment in terms of how seriously she's taking the state. She said last night that Bill Clinton wasn't the one running for President, but this is the next primary and he's the one who's staying behind.

Hillary Clinton isn't spending much time in the state, eh? Makes it more difficult to argue that she is pulling out all of the stops to win in South Carolina. So, this line of argument doesn't work, either. Still, it is not as though Clinton has entirely ignored the state, given that she has 29 events in South Carolina to Obama's 46 events.

Neither expectations argument holds water under closer scrutiny, which should be "expected" given that such arguments are designed to spin media coverage. Both arguments are based on kernels of truth--Obama does have something of an advantage in the state due to the large African-American population, and the Clinton campaign has invested quite a bit of resources in South Carolina--but in the end, do either really matter? The entire notion of momentum is predicated on the idea that a small, but not insignificant, number of voters in Super Tuesday states will factor the South Carolina results into their decision making process. That just didn't seem to happen after Nevada, probably because there just isn't as much build-up to, and post-election coverage of, states that follow Iowa and New Hampshire. Expectations are won not through arguments like these, but instead by getting a lot of people to tune into an election that you win. The best way to receive momentum is to make sure that a lot of people watch you win. Given the comparatively smaller build-up to the South Carolina caucuses, and given that not many people will be watching South Carolina returns late on a Saturday evening, I just don't think that there is much momentum to be had here. There will probably be more than last week, since there won't be any Republican results to share the headlines, but it still probably won't amount to much.

Tagged as: democrats, obama. clinton, south carolina

Chris Bowers was a full-time editor at MyDD from May 2004 until June 2007. Some of his projects have included the creation of the Liberal Blog Advertising Network, the first scientifically random poll of progressive netroots activists, the Use It Or Lose It campaign, the nation's most accurate forecast of Democratic house pickups in 2006, and the 2006 Googlebomb the Elections campaign.