The Daily Background

Although the polls in Pennsylvania certainly do seem to be tightening quite a bit (one poll has even shown Obama in the lead), he is still significantly behind in the Keystone State, which is demographically about as favorable as it could possibly be towards Clinton. So much so, in fact, that the Obama campaign is prepared to spin any loss within as many as ten points of Clinton as a victory.

As her surrogates have acknowledged, Pennsylvania is very much must-win for Clinton since the state is demographically tailor-made for her. Even a narrow loss here would, for her, mean that Obama has significant inroads and cut deeply into her strongest and most steadfast supporters. Luckily for Clinton however, the chances of her losing here is quite slim.

Obama’s best realistic hope in Pennsylvania is to try and keep Clinton’s net delegate pickup as small as possible by stemming the tide of her margins by Congressional District (CD). If a candidate gets something like 70%, say, of the vote in one CD which allocates 5 delegates, then they get 4 of those delegates to the other candidate’s 1. If they get less than 70% of the vote, then the delegate split is 3-2. In other words, Obama wants to make sure that Clinton only does *well* in Pennsylvania, not *great*.

And if recent polls are any indication, he seems to be doing just what he needs to do in the state. For the first time today, Chris Bowers at Open Left predicts a (roughly) ten delegate split between the two coming out of the state, with Clinton only emerging with ten more pledged delegates than Obama. That would be a win for the latter by anyone’s measurement. Well, anyone but Mark Penn, presumably.

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