In case you've been living on the dark side of the moon the last few weeks, Clinton and Obama have been going at each other with increasing intensity, having nothing else to do since there hasn't been a primary in six weeks. Pennsylvania has the demographics that should favor Clinton, and thus the expectation is that she will win the primary. The real question, however, is which of the two candidates will do better than expected? The current average of polls has Clinton up by about 6%. Most observers contend that she needs to win by about that much in order to maintain the status quo. If Clinton wins by a double digit margin, she really upends the state of the race, and we'll probably see the two of them slug it out all the way to the convention. If, on the other hand, Obama gets to within 3% or 4% of Clinton, we will see increasing movement of the superdelegates to his side, and increasing pressure on Clinton to consider withdrawing. And of course, if Obama somehow upsets Clinton and wins Pennsylvania outright, you can stick a fork in her campaign.
So what will happen? I think that as has happened in the past, Obama will lose a couple of percentage points off of what the polls tell us (due, perhaps, to latent racism that voters won't disclose to pollsters), and thus Clinton will win by 7% or 8%. However, Obama will come very close in the delegate count because of how the delegates are apportioned by district, and thus will lose very little ground in the overall delegate count. Unfortunately, this means no resolution in the near term, and we continue on with what has become an increasingly silly campaign.
Check back in Wednesday for further analysis, and feel free to make fun of how wrong my predictions turn out to be!
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