State count and Clinton's precarious position

Updated count of states won by popular vote, plus the margin of victory:

Clinton (10)

Arkansas +43
Oklahoma +24
New York +17
Massachusetts +15
Tennessee +13
California +10
New Jersey +10
Arizona +9
Nevada +6
New Hampshire +3

Obama (22)

Idaho +62
DC +51
Alaska +50
Kansas +48
Washington +37
Georgia +36
Nebraska +36
Colorado +35
Minnesota +35
Illinois+32
South Carolina +32
Virginia +29
North Dakota +24
Maryland +23
Louisiana +21
Maine +19
Utah +18
Alabama +14
Delaware +10
Iowa +9
Connecticut +4
Missouri +1

Clinton has only won two states by more than 20 points. Obama has won 15 by that margin.

What's more, remember when I wrote this after Obama survived the tough Super Tuesday calendar?

Well, Clinton came nowhere near what she needed to do to build a strong delegate lead (and super delegates can change their mind, they're not locked in). Obama needed to survive, and he did more than that -- he outright won the night.

Now his job is to finish off Clinton. If he can rack up a full month of 20%+ victories the rest of this month, he does just that.

People accused me of playing the expectations game before Super Tuesday by lowering the bar to Obama. Hogwash, I'm calling them as I see them. And that last paragraph is proof -- do you think the Obama spin is that he needs to sweep the rest of the month by 20% margins to knock Clinton out? Obviously not.

But if Obama does that, Clinton's money will dry up and the momentum toward the March contests will create an Obama tsunami.

So far, so good. In the post-Super Tuesday contests, these are Obama's margins:

DC +51
Washington +37
Nebraska +36
Virginia +29
Maryland +23
Louisiana +21
Maine +19

So okay, Obama didn't break 20 percent in Maine, but he was supposed to lose that one. And he's got some serious momentum at his back. I always thought Wisconsin would be a double-digit Obama victory, and the poll numbers are finally headed in that direction.  Even if you buy the notion that Obama is running a 48-state strategy, that sure beats Clinton's 2-state "Giuliani" strategy. She'll lose both Hawaii and Wisconsin, and probably by 20+ margins (again, I'm not a campaign shill trying to lower expectations. I'm calling 'em as I see 'em).

There's the turmoil at the top of Hillary HQ with the campaign manager and deputy campaign manager getting the boot. And then there's the money crunch. Sure, Clinton raised $10 million in that impressive run, but $10 million is not enough to run in every state. She'll try to minimize the damage in Wisconsin by running some media, but $10 million won't get her that far in the two hyper expensive states in which she's making her last stand -- Ohio and Texas. Texas is horrendously expensive:

TV, direct mail, and radio are, however, expensive, and more so than in any other state up for grabs on March 4 because of both the sheer number of media markets in the state and the high costs associated with several of those markets. The media markets in Houston, Dallas and San Antonio are, in fact, among the 11 most expensive broadcast media markets in the entire nation. No other state in America contains more than one of the nation’s 11 most expensive media markets (which are New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, Phoenix, Miami, Denver, Atlanta, and Washington, DC).

In fact, Texas has 23 media markets, including some in Louisiana and Oklahoma that reach into Texas. Compare that to Ohio, which "only" has 11 media markets, and none in the top 11 most expensive.

$10 million? That's peanuts. With Obama's momentum, her money woes, and her campaign turmoil, it looks like Clinton will have done a poor job of "surviving" February. And that bodes ill for her March 4th chances.

Update: Peter Daou of the Clinton campaign sends me a fundraising update:

We've raised $13 million on the Internet alone since Feb.1 (averaging a million a day and going strong).