The Clinton E-Mails
Penn’s memo urging the campaign to treat Barack Obama as insufficiently American has attracted the most press attention. But I found a February 4 Ickes memo the most interesting. As regular Cliopatria readers know, my scholarship explores the relationship between procedure and policy outcomes, and procedure obviously was critical in the 2008 nominating contest. As the race was occurring, I was baffled by the almost banal statements from the Clinton campaign in February, March, and April that their candidate could somehow pull ahead of Obama in the delegate race—even though the procedures through which the Democrats choose their nominee made that all but impossible. Were the Clinton staffers operating from a magic abacus?
No, as the Ickes memo spells out. On the eve of Super Tuesday, the Clinton campaign privately projected an overall defeat in the 22 primaries and caucuses to follow. It turned out that Ickes was pessimistic about his candidate's performance—projecting that Clinton would fall 51 delegates short of Obama on that day. (Obama won the day by 10 delegates.) Nor was Ickes wholly unrealistic about the bleak week that would follow Super Tuesday (LA, WA, NE, VI, Dems. Abroad, ME, VA, MD, DC), though he didn’t recognize how bad the results would actually be. The campaign projected a 64-delegate loss to Obama; Obama actually secured a 110-delegate advantage from the above primaries and caucuses.
Where the Clinton campaign badly failed to reach its internal expectations, however, was the period in which, according to most media narratives of the race, its “comeback” occurred. The Ickes memo bunched the four March 4 states (OH, TX, RI, VT) with the two preceding states (WI, HI). From those six states, he projected a 50-delegate Clinton advantage. Instead, Obama received 14 more delegates in that six-state process—thanks in large part to an overwhelming triumph in the Hawai’i caucuses. The Ickes projections also reinforce how important Obama’s triumph was in Wisconsin.
The Ickes projections were notable for two other reasons. First, Ickes appeared to have projected a healthy delegate win for Clinton in Texas—but he added a caveat: “Used the 33 CDs to make TX projections but will substitute the 32 [state] Senate districts when the demographic information for them is available.” One month before the Texas vote, then, even the Clinton campaign’s procedure specialist didn’t know the basics about the bizarre Texas process—explaining, perhaps, why Clinton would win the Texas primary but Obama would receive more delegates from the state.
Second, Ickes ended his periodization on March 4, and then had a catch-all category of “rest of states.” But before the large gap to Pennsylvania’s April 22 primary, two states voted within a week of the March 4 contests—Wyoming and Mississippi. Obama easily won both, netting nine delegates, or two more than Clinton netted for her Ohio win.
The Ickes memo was eye-opening for another reason: even with its underestimation of Clinton’s mid-February collapse and overestimation of her Feb. 19-March 11 performance, Ickes predicted that Clinton would finish 69 pledged delegates behind Obama. The path to the nomination, the memo stated, was based on Clinton’s ability to “gain the support of at least 191 of the remaining 392 uncommitted superdelegates.” (Though Ickes insisted on publicly referring to these delegates as “automatic delegates,” he didn’t use the designation in his own memo.)
Except for a last-ditch appeal from Mark Penn a few days before Clinton’s June concession, none of the e-mails released yesterday provided any guidance on just how the Clinton campaign expected roughly half of the superdelegates who hadn’t pledged to her when she was the overwhelming frontrunner to suddenly decide to hand the nomination to the second-place finisher. That, perhaps, was the campaign’s least realistic projection.