Also In This Issue California Primary: The Golden Prize · The Hispanic Vote: The Building Bloc · Graphic: Democratic Scorecard · Graphic: Republican Scorecard Related Resources On NationalJournal.com NationalJournal.com: "A Brokered Convention" (1/31/08) · PolitiScope: "The Double-Edged Sword" (1/31/08) · On The Trail: "Romney's On His Own Versus McCain" (1/30/08) · National Journal: "McCain Walking On Sunshine" (1/30/08) · Off To The Races: "Coming Into Focus, Maybe" (1/29/08) · NBC News/National Journal: "No Holdouts In Florida Race" (1/29/08) · Opening Argument: "Perils Of The Race And Gender Cards" (1/28/08) · National Journal Cover Story: "The Road Ahead" (1/11/08) · Ad Spotlight: White House Ad Archives · National Journal On Air: Interviews With The White House Candidates · Well-Read Wonk: Reviews Of Books Written By White House Candidates [an error occurred while processing this directive] Additional Resources On The Web Gallup Daily: Tracking Election 2008 · Pollster.com: National Polls (Democrats) · Pollster.com: National Polls (GOP)

By James A. Barnes, National Journal
© National Journal Group Inc.
Friday, Feb. 1, 2008

Put away the Robert's Rules of Order. Take a break from studying the party guidelines on how to challenge delegates' credentials. Despite the chatter from the political class that this might finally be the year that either the Democratic or the Republican presidential nomination -- or (gasp) both -- gets decided on the convention floor, it's not likely to happen.

These days, nominations are won on the battlefield, not in the back rooms. And with more than 80 percent of the delegates needed to win both the Democratic and Republican nominations up for grabs in the coast-to-coast primary and caucus bonanza on February 5, one candidate in each party is likely to gain enough of an advantage to become the probable nominee. Maybe there won't be a de facto standard-bearer on the morning of February 6. Maybe that doesn't happen until primary voters in Texas and Ohio weigh in on March 4, or Pennsylvania's voters deliver their verdict on April 22. But this is one decision that the Republican Party, at least, does not want to send to a convention in early September.

"It might be fun," mused David Norcross, Rules Committee chairman for the Republican National Committee. But he added, "We're better off making a pick, and I think we probably will."

Less than three weeks ago, most Republican operatives could hardly make sense of their party's presidential race: With three different winners in the first three key nominating contests -- the Iowa caucuses and the New Hampshire and Michigan primaries -- many observers were speculating that the race's outcome might be decided at the convention.

But since then, casualties have occurred and a front-runner has emerged, bringing some order to the GOP race. And those factors will likely pre-empt a brokered nomination, or even an extended fight for the party's crown.

Mac Is Back
Sen. John McCain's victory in the January 29 Florida primary establishes him as the party's clear favorite heading into 21 primaries and caucuses on Super Tuesday. And the Arizonan's strategists now believe that the momentum behind his candidacy could enable him to wrap up the GOP nomination on that date. "He has a good chance to end this on February 5," said McCain's senior adviser, Charles Black.

McCain's end-it-on-the-5th strategy is fairly simple: win the big, delegate-rich states that hold their primaries on Super Tuesday. Given the Republican Party's winner-take-all rules, that goal could be within his grasp. New York's 101 delegates and New Jersey's 52 will all go to McCain if he simply wins a plurality of the statewide vote in those two states. That task should be even easier with the endorsement of former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani, who withdrew from the GOP race after a disappointing third-place showing in the Florida primary.

All of Connecticut's 27 delegates are also allocated to the winner of the statewide vote, as are the 50 delegates in McCain's home state of Arizona. Illinois's 57 delegates are won by direct election in each of the state's 19 congressional districts, and all it takes is a simple plurality of votes in each district to elect a candidate's slate. The total delegate tally in those five states is 287, 28 percent of all GOP delegates at stake on February 5.

The GOP primary in the state with the most delegates to the party's national convention in September, California, is closed to all but registered Republican voters, which is why it was important for McCain to demonstrate in Florida that he could win such a primary. California's version of winner-take-all rules by congressional district could yield a huge portion of its 170 delegates to the victor.

The Catcher, Mitt
Mitt Romney has a different approach to February 5: win the six caucus and convention states on that date, capture the primary in his home state of Massachusetts, and conquer Utah, where Mormon voters dominate. One senior Romney strategist called this group "our high-return-on-investment states." Together, these eight states account for 249 convention delegates, and the Romney strategist said, "We think we can win 80 percent-plus of the delegates in those states." But the strategist acknowledged that winning the bulk of California's delegates would be critical to keeping Romney close to McCain in the delegate count and viable beyond Super Tuesday. "If it's still competitive after that, it's a state-by-state fight," he said.

That will not be easy if the results in Florida are any guide. McCain defeated Romney by only 5 percentage points, 36 percent to 31 percent, but the scope of his win was more impressive than the margin of victory. McCain carried all of the top five vote-producing counties in the primary, and eight of the top 10. He won the "gold coast" of Miami, Fort Lauderdale, and Palm Beach; Tampa Bay, St. Petersburg, and Sarasota on the Gulf Coast; and the "I-4 corridor" of Polk, Orange, and Volusia counties, which are home to the cities of Lakeland, Orlando, and Daytona Beach, respectively. Romney's metro strongholds were the counties around Jacksonville, Fort Myers, and Ocala.

The high-growth, multimedia-market Sunshine State shares other qualities with the Golden State, including the fact that California's Republicans have come to at least tolerate their own maverick, Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, who endorsed McCain on Thursday. The National Election Day exit poll of Florida's primary voters conducted by Edison/Mitofsky found that among white voters, who make up the bulk of Republican primary voters, Romney essentially tied McCain, winning 34 percent to the Arizonan's 33 percent. But Hispanics, including Cuban-Americans, were a key component of McCain's winning coalition in Florida; they cast a whopping 54 percent of their votes for McCain, followed by 24 percent for Giuliani and only 14 percent for Romney.

Southern and border states are also GOP battlegrounds on Super Tuesday. Alabama, Arkansas, Delaware, Georgia, Missouri, Oklahoma, and Tennessee have primaries that together account for 314 GOP convention delegates. Romney needs to consolidate the conservative Republican vote in those states to score victories, but that won't be easy with former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee still in the race.

Faced with the very real possibility that McCain the maverick could be nominated, the Republican Right will rally behind Romney, his supporters say.

"The rush has already started to stop the McCain train," contended Romney ally Bob Kjellander, a veteran Republican National Committee member from Illinois. He said that many of the 168 members of the RNC who are automatic delegates to the convention have a "visceral reaction" against McCain in large part because of his support for campaign finance reform.

McCain adviser Black played down the notion that a stop-McCain movement could gain critical mass among GOP conservatives and party regulars. "There are a few people [who have been] at it pretty hard and I don't think they've stopped us yet," Black said. The veteran Republican presidential strategist said that although "the conservative movement is split on this," its key grassroots organizations have not chosen sides in the McCain-Romney fight. "The ones that have horsepower outside the Beltway are neutral," said Black, pointing to the National Rifle Association and the National Right to Life Committee. But he added: "There are a few people around that we'll need to do some outreach with."

And then there's the desire among Republicans to hold on to the White House. Many see McCain's potential to win independent voters in November as the best way to accomplish that. "I think he'll be very difficult to stop because of the electability issue," said former Republican National Committee Chairman Frank Fahrenkopf. "Knowing the party as I know the party, the party doesn't want to lose."

Democratic Two Step
Meanwhile, in less than a week's time, the Democratic race has been roiled by a string of events that could point to a protracted struggle between the front-runner, Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton of New York, and her ascendant challenger, Sen. Barack Obama of Illinois. Obama followed up his decisive victory in the South Carolina primary on January 26 -- which was magnified by former President Clinton's comments that many Democrats saw as disparaging Obama, or worse -- by getting the endorsement of party icon Edward Kennedy of Massachusetts. Two days after that, former Sen. John Edwards of North Carolina abandoned the race, throwing the Clinton-Obama fight into even sharper relief.

The one-two punch of South Carolina's results and Sen. Kennedy's endorsement gave Obama momentum heading into the 22 states that hold a Democratic primary or caucus on Super Tuesday. "Whoever wins the sprint to February 5 is going to do very well, and it looks to me like Obama is winning the sprint," said veteran Democratic presidential campaign strategist Tad Devine, who began tracking convention delegates in 1984 for the party's eventual nominee, Walter Mondale.

But Clinton has a slight head start in the overall delegate race, thanks to her support from the "unpledged" delegates: party leaders and elected officials who account for 796 delegate votes, or about 20 percent of the convention total. According to CNN, she has already won endorsements from 184 of them, which gives her a 74-delegate lead over Obama, even though in the first four Democratic primaries and caucuses he has won 63 pledged delegates to her 48.

Obama cannot let Clinton's lead grow any larger on February 5. That is because the Democratic Party's rules of proportional representation allocate delegates in approximate equivalence to the percentage of votes that each candidate receives in the caucuses and primaries, as long as a candidate wins at least 15 percent of the ballots that are cast within each congressional district and statewide.

If Clinton is able to win the delegate-rich states of California and New York with a combined total of 602 delegates -- more than a third of the 1,681 at stake on Super Tuesday -- then she is likely to emerge with an even larger delegate lead unless Obama can offset her in other states that day. To be sure, Obama is vigorously contesting the Golden State and has a home-field advantage when it comes to the 153 delegates that Illinois will award that day. His campaign's organizational prowess could enable him to win the caucuses in Alaska, Colorado, Kansas, Idaho, Minnesota, and North Dakota, which together account for 203 delegates.

Given the overwhelming support that Obama has received from African-American primary voters, he's also likely to do well in the Tuesday primaries in Alabama, Georgia, and Tennessee, which are worth 207 total delegates. High-profile endorsements in other battleground primaries -- from Gov. Janet Napolitano in Arizona, Sen. Claire McCaskill in Missouri, and Kennedy in Massachusetts -- make him competitive in those states, which will select a total of 221 delegates.

"We are very well organized in all 22" Super Tuesday states, Obama campaign manager David Plouffe said in a recent conference call with reporters.

The rules of proportional representation make it hard for a Democratic front-runner to put away a challenger, but they make it even harder for a challenger to overtake a front-runner. That's because even if the second-place candidate in the delegate count begins to beat the delegate leader, the leader can still acquire enough delegates to maintain a lead. "It's very difficult to gain a distinct advantage, but it's almost impossible to overcome a lead," Devine said. Or as another top delegate counter put it, "If a candidate were behind by 150 to 200 delegates after Super Tuesday, then the losing candidate needs to start winning primaries by 20 percentage points, really quickly, or they run out of time to catch up."

With this year's front-loaded primary calendar, the Democratic presidential candidate in second place simply runs out of opportunities to compete after March 4: By that date, more than 80 percent of the party's pledged convention delegates will have been allocated. And while the front-runner may have just a narrow lead, the unpledged delegates can move en masse to put him or her over the top.

If Obama draws even with Clinton in the delegate count after Super Tuesday, however, the calendar could turn on her. The next nine states that hold caucuses or primaries could easily tilt to Obama. On February 9, black voters in Louisiana's primary could tip the state to Obama. In the Nebraska caucuses that day, Obama has the backing of Sen. Ben Nelson, and in Washington state's caucuses his outsider status might appeal to voters. On February 12, Obama could find other promising territory in Maryland, with its mix of well-educated suburbanites and urban blacks; in Virginia, where Gov. Tim Kaine has endorsed Obama; and in the District of Columbia, with its large African-American population. And on February 19, Obama could play well in the Wisconsin primary, given the state's progressive tradition.

With momentum, Obama would head to a showdown with Clinton in the Ohio primary on March 4. Her strong support among Hispanics still makes her the prohibitive favorite in the Texas primary that same day. And the leader in the delegate count on March 5 would be poised -- perhaps slowly, but surely -- to grind out the remaining contests, with unpledged delegates jumping on board to get to the magic number of 2,025.

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