Friday Night Ill-Advised Primary Prediction Post

Let's have a Friday night ill-advised primary prediction post. Although Obama did slightly worse in Texas and Ohio than I expected, the rest of my original prediction has so far come to pass (especially the bit about the media backlash, which has been unreal, today particularly).

The big question is this: can he actually win Pennsylvania?

At this moment I put the odds on that at a rather pessimistic 20%. Pennsylvania's a very tough state for him demographically, he's got problems with the machine in Philly because he endorsed the other mayoral candidate, and he's coming at things from a significantly weaker position that I expected he would be. I thought he'd have won Texas, and I certainly didn't expect the Wright shitstorm that's going on in the media right now. (It's worth saying that I don't think the Wright story is that bad for Obama long-term, because many Americans who go to church have this sort of relationship with their pastors and nearly everyone knows that Wright is just a crazy old man—but it's certainly bad press right now.)

So let's say:

* 25% says he wins Pennsylvania outright, is clearly the nominee, and Hillary drops out.

* Another 33% of the time he loses Pennsylvania but takes the nomination anyway on the strength of his February and post-PA victories, even if it takes him all the way to Puerto Rico or (god forbid) Denver.

* 10% of the time Hillary is somehow able to pull out a crazy spin victory in the press, possibly on the grounds of a strong showing in a Florida revote, and gets to be on the top of the ticket with Obama almost-certainly the VP.

* 10%: something even more crazy and unpredictable happens.

That leaves around 20%. And I'm going to lay out a scenario now to account for that last 20% that is just starting to congeal for me. I might even secretly put its likelihood at more than 20%—I like it, a lot, but I'm still thinking hard about it. It goes like this:

As Matt Yglesias laid out nicely earlier today, Clinton's campaign thrives on uncertainty. The only pretense she has to a legitimate candidacy is the uncertainty in the process, the superdelegates in particular. And as we all know, one of the bigger uncertainties at the moment is Michigan and Florida. With the mail-in revote looking increasingly doomed, the most likely resolution seems to be this one, in which the Florida delegation is seated but halved and Michigan either does a revote or is simply split down the middle. (Based on the polling, these Michigan options amount to more or less the same thing in the end.) Ben Nelson came out in favor of this plan today, and frankly it's seemed to me like the least worst option, particularly for Obama fans, precisely because it denies Clinton the chance to declare a Florida revote she's likely to win big the be-all and end-all of the primary.

I think we could see an agreement like this announced in the next two weeks, seating Florida as-is at half-price and doing X or Y with Michigan.

If this happens, it sucks a lot of uncertainty out of the air and therefore a lot of air out of Clinton's candidacy. If Florida and Michigan are at last settled, and she's already had her "big comeback" in Ohio and Texas and gotten nothing out of it, she's left with almost no leverage with which to grab the nomination. The supers won't swing it to her in that situation, and I think even she knows it.

So what does she do? Maybe she decides to destroy Obama so she can win in 2012. But I think she wants the nomination so badly precisely because she knows either one of them can beat McCain in almost any circumstances; she can't destroy Obama and keep her hands clean enough to have a chance in 2012. So instead she decides she'd rather be Senate Majority Leader (as she always should have been) or else Governor of New York (I hear there's an opening) than the woman who elected John McCain. So she makes a speech declaring that she kept her word to the people of Florida and made sure that their votes counted.

And then she drops out. Before Pennsylvania.

Put the odds on that, tonight, at a rather optimistic 20%.