Down to the Wire Super Tuesday Coverage

I think we've established by now that all of these polls don't strictly mean anything in and of themselves, but taken together they paint a picture of a continuing Obama surge. There are only two days left before Super Tuesday, so the prospects for a radical game-changer are growing slimmer and slimmer. It's not wise to make predictions about such a volatile situation—and you'll note that my predictions regarding the big three remaining endorsements have not come to pass—but in general I think the schematic I laid out before the debate still holds:

* Knockout punch on Super Tuesday from Barack (most likely)
* Long hard slog into March, which Barack wins (close second)
* Knockout punch on Super Tuesday from Clinton
* Long hard slog into March, which Clinton wins (least likely, but not especially unlikely)

I want to clarify, as I did in the comments of that post. I don't mean that Clinton is so beaten on Tuesday that she drops out the next day; that'd be nice, but I don't think that's especially likely to happen. Rather, what I mean by knockout is "being perceived to have won and to be winning solidly," a perception that is unlikely to be challenged in the later February contests and into March.

As I said in the earlier post, this is a lot easier for Barack to accomplish. First, the race is very tight and the trends are going his way, which would suggest that if the polls are wrong they'll be wrong in his favor. (And some of the polls from that TPM link already seem out of date; contrary to what they have listed, there's a new poll from Utah that has Obama with a two-to-one lead, and Meet the Press this morning had Obama ahead in Alabama 47-41%, Idaho, Alaska, and way ahead in Georgia.)

A win in California would pretty much be a knockout for Obama, as James Carville reluctantly admitted on Meet the Press this morning; if New York is close or somehow goes Barack's way, that looks to me something like a knockout too. A surprise win in the Northeast is something else for him to crow about, and he looks like he may really win at least Connecticut. If Obama winds up ahead in delegates at the end of the night, I think that's close to a knockout, because the February schedule is so favorable to him; it's possible that a "tie" or close loss could even wind up looking like a knockout in retrospect, given that Clinton started out so far ahead and that she looks likely only to lose delegate ground between February 6 until March 4.

The upside for Obama in the rest of February is very good, and he's still got Edwards (likely) and Gore (less likely, but hopefully) in the bank. He could be down a few hundred delegates—I've seen claims that he could be down by as many as 800 or 900 I misspoke here; I meant to say that he could be down with only 800-900 delegates after Super Tuesday and still recover. For her part, Clinton needs to perform much better than Obama on Tuesday if she hopes to win the nomination; she really would have liked to be able to put him away this week.

The game, as always in American politics, is perception. Obama's people haven't always been the best at managing perceptions in the press, but they've been getting better at it—they need to be out there with their narrative immediately and not allow the Clintons to set a "comeback" frame. It's not. Her campaign is more or less in freefall, whether or not it finally hits bottom on Tuesday or she squeaks out a win.

In any event, the polls are very encouraging for those hoping for either a win or draw for Obama.

The new Rasmussen poll has Obama up in California by a point. The Field poll, with a huge number of undecideds, has her up by two—both a statistical dead heat. More incredibly, Zogby has him up by four in California, up by 20% in Georgia, down one in Missouri, and down one in New Jersey. (If those New Jersey numbers are right, they're shocking, and augur a real Obama blowout. I'm pretty skeptical.)

We'll see a lot more polling in the next few days, but the trend lines for the last week have been generally the same: Obama is rapidly gaining in states that Clinton has been leading for months. Even if he doesn't win Super Tuesday in terms of either states or delegates, he has the money and the "firewalls" to go forward and still win the nomination. I think for Clinton the story is rather different; a tie on Super Tuesday, or a surprise loss in either California or the Northeast, leaves her in very bad shape for February and beyond. And a slim win isn't all that much better for her; she needs a clear victory to help propel her forward, and she doesn't seem likely right now to get it. I think this is very good news; b, heroically arguing for Hillary in a comment thread down the page, almost certainly disagrees.