Although polls show Hillary Clinton leading
Barack Obama by half a dozen points heading into today’s
Pennsylvania primary, she will need a bigger margin of victory to satisfy the skeptics.
Trailing Obama by 800,000 votes after 40 contests, Clinton would need to beat him by a healthy double-digit margin to significantly dent his popular vote lead.
“Coming out of Pennsylvania, we obviously hope to narrow the gap in the popular vote considerably and get very, very close in the popular vote,” Clinton spokesman Howard Wolfson said during a conference call Monday.
But Wolfson and Clinton strategist Geoff Garin balked when pressed by The Examiner on whether their boss needed a margin of victory of 10 to 20 points in Pennsylvania.
“Those numbers are ridiculous,” Garin said.
Wolfson insisted that even a one-vote victory would be sufficient for Clinton.
“I just reject the notion that we need to achieve a certain standard of victory other than victory,” he said. “The goal tomorrow is to come out of Pennsylvania with a ‘W.’ And whether it’s one vote or 100 votes or 1,000 votes or 100,000 votes, it does not matter.”
Obama, who trailed Clinton in Pennsylvania by 17 points just a month ago, is equally adamant about keeping expectations low.
“I’m not predicting a win,” he told KDKA radio in Pittsburgh Monday. “I’m predicting it’s going to be close and that we are going to do a lot better than people expect.”
To a large extent, Clinton is pinning her hopes on working-class white voters in small towns and rural sections of Pennsylvania to pad her margin of victory. This is the first election to take place since Obama committed a major gaffe by remarking that such voters, especially in economically distressed regions, are “bitter” people who “cling to guns or religion.”
There is also the lingering effect of a major controversy over Obama’s ex-pastor, the Rev. Jeremiah Wright, who rails against whites and once exhorted his flock, “God damn America!” The controversy could still cost Obama support among late-breaking undecided voters.
If such a shift occurs, it could be chalked up in part to the “Bradley effect,” a phenomenon in which a black candidate fares better in opinion polls than in actual elections against a white candidate. In 1982, black candidate Tom Bradley lost the California gubernatorial race to white candidate George Deukmejian, though Bradley was ahead in opinion surveys heading into the election.
Similarly,in 1989, polls showed black candidate Douglas Wilder leading white candidate Marshall Coleman by nine points going into the Virginia gubernatorial race, which Wilder ended up winning by less than half a percentage point.
