Here's my reaction to the prevailing Pennsylvania story – which is to say a close look at how the media does the Clinton’s spinning for her.
The examples of this are legion, but I’ll parse just one that is stuck in my head. The 8 a.m. lead-in to the news on NPR’s morning edition went something like this: "Good Morning. The pundits all said that Hillary Clinton needed a 10-point win in Pennsylvania last night to stay alive. And she won ... (pause)... by ten points."
As a statement goes, it is good copy – it is seemingly informative, captures what I would say is the conventional wisdom, and pithy to boot.
The only problem is that it is dead wrong on three accounts.
First, "the pundits" did not all say that Clinton needed to win by ten. In fact, no pundit that I heard (and as an election coverage addict, I heard a lot of it) made any such prediction. The pundits did say she needed a "big win" – but no one to my knowledge specifically defined big as "ten points," at least not until well into the evening when it appeared that a 10-point lead was possible. I’m fairly certain that had Obama appeared to win by 8 (which might actually be closer to the truth – see below), no pundit would have said, "well it’s over; Clinton has failed." Rather, the story would still have been that Clinton won Pennsylvania, and therefore that she lives to campaign another fortnight.
Second, even if the pundits HAD said that, it would have been inaccurate. Given Clinton’s delegate deficit – roughly 150 pledged delegates, and roughly 125 overall – Clinton needed a much larger victory to have a chance at making up the difference by the end of the primary season. In fact, the estimates I saw suggested she needed about a 30-point margin in the PA vote (as well as in all other primaries the rest of the way) to catch Obama. And if you factor in that several of the remaining states are likely to be Obama victories – North Carolina, Oregon, and Montana come to mind – Clinton probably needed a 40-pt win (i.e., 70-30) to have a realistic shot at making up her deficit.
Third, it is inaccurate to say that Clinton won by 10. True, all the main news outlets are reporting Clinton-55, Obama 45, and 55 minus 45 is to. However, let’s turn to the actually vote tally. According to CNN, it is 1,258,245 for Clinton and 1,042,297 for Obama. Divide the difference by the sum to get the margin in percentage point terms, and it comes to 9.4 %. (Or, in other words, the actually percentages for the candidates were 54.7% for Clinton and 45.3% for Obama.) Unless we’ve developed a national allergy to decimals and/or rounding, that’s a 9-point win for Clinton. By the "pundits" own mythical criteria, Clinton failed to attain the threshold she needed. (Actually, it may even be worse than that: what CNN and other outlets are reporting deviates from the results posted by the Pennsylvania Secretary of State as per the PA Democratic Party, who is the one supposed to keep track. As of 9:30 on Wednesday morning, they had 1,237,221 for Clinton and 1,042,893 for Obama. Believing in the utility of retaining at least one decimal point, they note that this means 54.3% for Clinton and 45.7% for Obama – an 8.6 percentage point margin.)
So, NPR can lead off its top-off-the-hour news report with "The pundits all said that Hillary Clinton needed a 10-point win in Pennsylvania last night to stay alive. And she won ... (pause)... by ten points," but it was just lazy journalism for it to have done so. It truly would have been more accurate to state:
"To make up the ground she needed to challenge Barack Obama for the Democratic nomination, Hillary Clinton needed to win Pennsylvania last night by at least thirty points. She won Pennsylvania . . . (pause) . . . but only by 9 points, a margin far too small to save her fading chances."