Sure nice to see this morning that Obama, though losing California, has made great strides towards closing the vote gap there, and thus the delegate count. When I went to bed at 1:00am, Clinton was trouncing him 55-32%. When I woke up, I saw that the score in Cali is now 52-42%, with 94% reporting in. He will likely take home a good chunk of delegates from the Golden State due to a disappointing, but still solid finish there. Plus, he whooped up elsewhere nationwide, taking Illinois, Georgia, Alabama, Connecticut, Minnesota, Delaware, Utah, North Dakota, Colorado, Kansas, Idaho, Alaska, and yes baby, Missouri!
In Los Angeles County, independents in at least 15 precincts said they were never told that they had to mark an extra box on their ballots in order for the ballots to be counted, and voters from more than a dozen polling places also reported being erroneously told that they were not allowed to vote for a Democratic candidate.
Unaffiliated or “decline-to-state” voters account for nearly 20 percent of registered voters in California, and more than 700,000 voters in Los Angeles County. The Republican Party does not allow them to vote in its primary, but Democrats and the state’s American Independent Party do.
The confusion may well have hurt the Obama campaign, which has fared well with independents previously and which carried two-thirds of them here, exit polls showed. His campaign set off automated calls, or “robocalls,” to voters on Monday, reminding independent voters to fill in the second oval declaring that they were voting in the Democratic primary.
In addition, the mail-in vote looks like it really will make a difference in the final California tabulations.
Still, the final results will be known in fuller detail on Wednesday, because roughly half the state’s primary voters cast paper ballots by mail, not in person at the polls. Those ballots must be fed manually into scanners, following Ms. Bowen’s decision last year to decertify the vast majority of electronic voting machines on the ground that they were defective and vulnerable to tampering.
Did she say HALF? Oh geez...
All together, we're looking at a delegate grab last night for Clinton of 584, to Obama's 569, with changes likely as tabulations harden. Factoring in both candidates' previous wins (Iowa, NH, Nevada and S. Carolina), we have Clinton at 845, Obama at 765.
This 80-delegate difference dovetails nicely with Obama campaign manager David Plouffe's statement on Monday that ending up within 100 delegates of Clinton after Tuesday was the campaign's goal. Of course it's spin. That doesn't mean that Plouffe wasn't right to call that a good position to be in, or that there's anything wrong with getting your spin right. You just don't want to get it wrong. That's what Mitt Romney does.
The Obama campaign did great last night, and by meeting their media expectations, can't be labeled the losing team. Had they fallen outside the 100 margin, they would have handed themselves a bitter news cycle defeat.
