Presidential candidate Barack Obama could begin to leave rival Democrat Hillary Clinton in his rearview mirror today if he wins primaries in Virginia, Maryland and Washington, D.C.
The Battle of the Potomac come on the heels of five decisive victories by Obama over Clinton, who reacted by demoting her campaign manager. Clinton has all but written off today’s vote and is already pinning her hopes on March 4 primaries in Ohio and Texas.
“We have always known and said that the next set of elections coming up were going to be a lot more difficult for us,” senior Clinton adviser Ann Lewis told NBC Monday. “We’ve got some big states coming up on March [4] that are going to be very important.”
The Obama campaign scoffed at that logic.
“It’s an odd strategy to say you can lose contest after contest in every part of the country and somehow remedy that by winning next month,” said senior Obama adviser David Axelrod.
Obama was leading Clinton by 17 percentage points in Virginia and 21 in Maryland, according to Real Clear Politics, which averages major polls. He is also expected to run strongly in the District, in part because of its large African-American population.
“We’re feeling good about it, but we recognize that these primaries are in Senator Clinton’s backyard,” Axelrod said. “She’s been a fixture on the Washington scene for almost two decades. So, you know, we’re not taking it for granted.”
Over the weekend, Obama beat Clinton in Louisiana, Nebraska, Maine, Washington state and the Virgin Islands. With Obama pulling ahead in the delegate count, Clinton replaced her campaign manager, Patti Solis Doyle, with longtime aide Maggie Williams.
On the Republican side, John McCain has emerged as the clear front-runner, although he has yet to dispatch rival Mike Huckabee, who won Kansas and Louisiana over the weekend. Huckabee is also protesting a decision by the Washington State Republican Party to declare McCain the winner before completing a count of all ballots.
“They just simply quit counting votes with 87 percent of the vote in,” Huckabee told CNN. “That’s completely outrageous. So, we’re challenging that.”
Mark McKinnon, a senior adviser to McCain, said he agreed with Huckabee that the votes should be counted, although he said even a reversal would not change much.
“The fact is that Mike Huckabee himself said it would take a miracle for him to win the nomination,” McKinnon said. “No matter what happens in Washington, the delegates’ math simply won’t work, no matter how it goes.”
