(Cross-posted at The Field.)
Just got off a conference call with Obama campaign manager David Plouffe and Senator John Kerry. Plouffe – for the first time in the campaign – highlighted Obama’s “strength among small town and rural voters.”
Citing “the four percent lead over Senator Clinton” in rural New Hampshire, and that “in Nevada we did much better in the Northern and rural districts, and of course in South Carolina,” Plouffe said: “We think that sets us up very well on February 5… We think we’re going to do very well in rural areas on February 5 and that’s going to make a difference in delegates.”
This, of course, is a story line that readers of The Field have been following since December. While other media obsessed with "identity politics," we've been saying wait a minute, the real demographic surprise of the year is right here! Plouffe's statements today mark a milestone in the efforts of rural voters to be recognized for their true worth as an important group of voters...
(One sign of the massive number of rural votes out there is that, now receiving over 75,000 readers a day after just six weeks of blogging, our server crashed this morning: Please excuse any inconveniences while we remodel to fit the bigger crowds stampeding into The Field.)
Plouffe added that, “by tomorrow we will be on the radio or television in every February 5 state except Illinois… We’re buying New York and Philadelphia broadcast TV, beefing up our Los Angeles buy,” and said that “over $5 million dollars in online donations alone since South Carolina” have helped make that possible. (That means they’re also on the air in the highly rural states of Idaho, North Dakota, Kansas, Minnesota, Alaska, Utah, Alabama and Oklahoma - and the larger states with big urban centers also have significant swathes of rural votes: New York, New Jersey, California, Arizona, Missouri, Illinois, Tennessee, Georgia.)
Plouffe cited Obama’s lead in pledged delegates, with 68 to 48 for Clinton and 26 for Edwards, and referred to superdelegates – where Clinton began the year with an edge of slightly more than 100 - as unpledged ones: “they’re not pledged. They’re able to move around… in the last week we’ve gained a lot of DNC delegates… we’ve been able to cut into that pretty dramatically.” (As example, he cited US Rep. Raul Grijalva (D-Arizona) who just switched from Edwards to Obama today. He’s right: Anyone that counts on, um, politicians to go down with sinking ships is in for unpleasant surprises.)
The Obama campaign manager also claimed that he counted with “75,000 volunteers” in the Tsunami Tuesday states actively campaigning right now.
John Kerry was also on the conference call and noted that the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees has been waging independent expenditures for Clinton in Florida’s zero-sum beauty contest: “So now here we are with AFSCME spending literally unbelievable sums of money down there trying to influence a contest that awards zero delegates.”
“It is not a legitimate race,” said Kerry. “It should not become a spin race.”
The Clinton campaign held a conference call of its own (The Field wasn’t invited) but other reporters have noted that it mainly is spinning counter-clockwise to say that Florida’s results tonight really do matter.
That’s going to be the next mini-war between the two campaigns, and it happens tonight. Of course, the best way to diminish the news value of one story is to create a bigger story. We’ll see soon enough if the Obama camp has such an ace up its sleeve tonight.