Thursday Muse; Clinton To Concede on Saturday, Endorse Obama

June 5, 2008

Finally, after six grueling months of primaries, we can get on to the general election. Hillary Clinton, after pretending to stay in the race for a day so that she could get as much money as she could before exiting the race, has agreed to end her bid to become president and endorse the party’s nominee on Saturday.

One thing that should be interesting to see is whether Clinton releases her delegates or whether she keeps them to attempt to make history. The possibility of her using her supporters as a bargaining tool to get on the ticket has not been ruled out yet, though rumors seem to indicate that Obama’s camp would rather not put her on the ticket.

In perhaps the final poll that will include Hillary Clinton in any role besides VP, 56% of voters in Washington state said that Clinton does “what’s best for Hillary” rather than what’s best for America, with similar numbers in Philadelphia. 50% in this poll said that they’d want Hillary to be either the VP or a cabinet member, and 40% said she should run again for president. The most interesting part of that poll was that 9% of voters said that they’d vote for somebody besides John McCain or Barack Obama in November, presumably Bob Barr or Ralph Nader, and that Obama leads that poll 63-19 over McCain, which is obviously way more than he’ll beat McCain by in Washington. In the city of Philadelphia, where the same poll was taken, 13% said they’d vote for either Barr or Nader, as did 13% in New York city. The big difference is that in Philly, about 40% of independents say they’ll be voting for a third party, while in New York it’s mainly the Republicans and Democrats who say they’ll vote third-party.

If third-party voters can get 10% of the vote, as seems distinctly possible, it would probably favor Obama in closely contested states with a libertarian mindset (Nevada, Indiana, maybe Montana) where Barr may try to deliberately sap votes from McCain. Now third-party polling numbers rarely hold up to what they start out as, but Barr could be a unique case because he’s polling at 7% nationally despite the fact that only 36% of Americans know who he is. If he can get the publicity to get that number up to 75%, he may be able to tread water and continue collecting 7% of the vote. On the other hand, the Nader protest vote may be popular among disaffected Clinton supporters, but it’s unlikely to make a difference because these would be people who wouldn’t have voted for Obama anyway. If Nader gets a million votes this election, it would be a logical leap to say that those million votes would have otherwise gone to Obama.

And that’s the Muse.

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