WI Primary Night

As the numbers have come in tonight, it's become very clear that it's been a big night for Barack Obama. In addition to piling up a 17 point win in a race that Hillary Clinton was hoping to keep around 5 points, Barack continued to increase his support in almost every measureable demographic. Most significantly, he continues his streak of primary wins going into March 4th. That means the next two weeks will bring only more talk of his momentum and HRC's struggles.

Tonight's results also put Hillary into a tough position. She not only has to run the table in Ohio, Texas, and Pennsylvania, she has to do it in a BIG way. At this point (and I'll be the first to admit that there's still a lot of time left), she simply can't pull it off. Let's assume she wins in Pennsylvania, largely due to the deep roots she has with the Democratic political machine. That leaves Ohio and Texas. Even if she can hold onto her lead in Ohio, she is currently running dead even in Texas. This simply won't cut it, especially given the fact that there has been a lot of talk tonight by pundits about how Ohio could very easily fall in line with Wisconsin's results given the similarities in the makeup of the voting populations. Even if she hold's off Barack's charge, she cannot simply win 51-49 or 53-47. She needs to win big! And by big I mean 20 points or so. This is the only way she'll be able to get the delegates needed to get back into the race, and I just don't see this happening.

So where does the HRC campaign go from here? Now that is a good question. She has tried to be positive. It hasn't worked. She's tried going negative. Voters haven't responded. So what's left? HRC staffers are claiming that their "comparative" strategy (read: negative attacks) was the only reason that their loss in Wisconsin wasn't 20 or 25 points. Although that's an interesting theory, it doesn't seem to hold much water. Going into election day, polls had predictions varying from Hillary leading by 5ish to Barack leading by 20. Seeing as the spread will end up being around 17ish, it doesn't make sense to claim that the attacks worked. Barack won, and he won big. There's no two ways around it. This means that the HRC campaign has some serious soul searching to do in order to come up with some strategy to pull of a string of decisive victories. Anything short of that on March 4th, and Barack Obama could emerge as the Democratic nominee.