Obama Scores 10th Straight Victory in Wisconsin and Hawaii

Obama wins Wisconsin for ninth straight primary victory

Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel | February 19, 2008

By CRAIG GILBERT

Drawing support from a wide swath of voters in an ultra-competitive Midwestern battleground, Barack Obama soundly defeated Hillary Rodham Clinton in the Wisconsin primary Tuesday, giving him nine straight victories and a powerful upper hand in their fierce struggle for the Democratic nomination.

Along with winning a majority of the state's 74 pledged delegates, Obama also demonstrated the kind of broad appeal that will be critical in the big showdown states ahead, especially Ohio on March 4.

That coalition included groups that have backed him in past contests: young voters, independents and the college-educated.

But in a brief, sharp-edged campaign here, Obama also made inroads among women and blue-collar voters, who have more typically backed Clinton.

He won half of all voters without a college degree - about 60% of the Democratic electorate. He won half of those with family incomes under $50,000. He dominated among white men - 59% to 38%. And he battled Clinton to a draw among women.

All of these groups were components of an overwhelmingly white electorate (87%) with a grim view of the economy. It also was an electorate hungry for change, an impulse that exit polls showed decisively favored Obama.

"All across the country, people are standing up and saying it is time to turn the page," Obama said at a rally in Houston, thanking Wisconsin voters for their civic pride and fortitude.

"In Wisconsin, when you go to vote, it's 5 degrees outside," he said.

Obama was leading Clinton by about 58% to 41%.

As expected, Wisconsin's open primary proved to be a boon to the Illinois senator. Independents (28%) and Republicans (9%) together made up more than a third of the Democratic primary electorate - almost the exact same breakdown as in the state's 2004 primary.

Obama carried independents by about 30 percentage points, according to the exit polls.

But Obama's performance was striking in other ways that will help him make his case in upcoming states and to the party's powerful bloc of unpledged super delegates.

One, his victory was big and broad, exit polls suggested.

Two, it came in a 50/50 battleground - the closest state in the country in 2004 - that is a virtual must-win for Democrats in November.

Three, it came in the kind of environment that Clinton herself has said provides added legitimacy - a big-turnout primary, rather than the kind of low-turnout caucuses that Obama has dominated this year by out-organizing his opponents.

With the vote totals not quite complete, it appeared that Wisconsin had generated at least the third-highest turnout rate of any Democratic contest this year, after New Hampshire and Massachusetts.

"I think there's evidence, at least in Wisconsin, there are some cracks in the Clinton coalition," said Democratic pollster Mark Mellman, who doesn't work for either candidate and has polled in Wisconsin in the past.

Mellman said Obama's performance here doesn't guarantee success March 4 in Ohio and Texas, but "he's demonstrating he can win the kinds of voters he needs to take Ohio and Texas."

Gov. Jim Doyle, Obama's highest-profile supporter in the state, said Tuesday's victory shows that "he can compete for any group (of voters) at all."

Clinton held a rally in Youngstown, Ohio, on Tuesday night, telling her supporters that this was "about picking a president who relies not just on words but on work, on hard work to get America back to work."

With its big independent vote, its same-day registration so amenable to students and first-time voters and its shared border with Obama's home state of Illinois, Wisconsin was a source of worry for the Clinton campaign throughout the run-up to Tuesday's primary. Her aides worked so hard to keep expectations low that at times they seemed to be conceding the state.

As of Monday morning, 24 hours before the voting started, Clinton had not done a single event outside the Milwaukee media market. One reason was a Sunday storm that postponed a planned fly-around. But the main reason was her tardy arrival in the state.

She got to Wisconsin four days later than her opponent, campaigning last week largely via surrogates, TV ads, phone and satellite. She launched the first exchange of negative ads between the two in the 2008 campaign. Exit polls suggested she fared poorly in that exchange, with more voters viewing her attacks as unfair than his. She also was outspent more than 3-to-1 on TV in the state.

Her efforts to pressure Obama into a Wisconsin debate, a key message of her ads, weren't helped by the fact she was making her case from Ohio and Texas.

"We've always said we think Wisconsin is challenging," Clinton strategist Mark Penn said Tuesday. "There's a very substantial independent vote that is very favorable to Senator Obama."

But while the state's open-primary system favored Obama, its demographics were in some ways good for Clinton: white, relatively Catholic and blue-collar - all features that had worked to Clinton's favor in many other places.

"Oh, that there was more time," said Lt. Gov. Barb Lawton, a Clinton supporter, who added that Ohio and Texas are now "larger than life."

Doyle said Tuesday that he thought the Clinton campaign appeared to have trouble deciding how to approach the state.

"They were worried about losing, so they didn't want to make it look like they were trying very hard," he said. "If Hillary Clinton can't come in and win in (a state like) Wisconsin, she's not going to get the nomination."

Wisconsin voters turned out in frigid single-digit temperatures, almost one-fifth of them voting in their first presidential primary, according to the exit polls.

While 46% of the voters in the Democratic primary termed themselves liberal, an additional 40% described themselves as moderate and 14% as conservative. Obama carried all three groups.

The economy was rated the top concern by the largest number of voters (more than 40%), followed by the war and health care. Nine of 10 voters rated the economy "not so good" or "poor."

Those attitudes, a state that is unusually dependent on manufacturing and the looming Ohio contest help explain why the campaigns of both Clinton and Obama took a populist turn here, debating their records on trade and their plans to bolster the economy.

Obama faced a last-minute controversy, drawing heavy discussion on cable news and the Internet, over rhetoric that he borrowed from friend and Massachusetts Gov. Deval Patrick. Clinton aides charged plagiarism. But in dozens of interviews with Journal Sentinel reporters at polling places Tuesday, the issue almost never came up.

Asked to say what quality about the candidates mattered most to their choice, about half said it was the ability to bring about "needed change," and they broke heavily for Obama. Far fewer (about a quarter) cited the "right experience," and they voted overwhelmingly for Clinton.

Among the few demographic groups carried by Clinton: white women (narrowly), voters 60 or over, and white Democrats.

Young voters clearly boosted Obama's margins. Those between 18 and 29 years old accounted for 16% of the vote, up sharply from the 2004 primary, when they were 11% of the vote. Obama carried that group, 70% to 26%. Obama carried African-American voters 91% to 8%, but they made up only 8% of the electorate.

Obama was dominant in the state's two major Democratic counties, Milwaukee and Dane, winning them by roughly 2-to-1 margins.

But he also carried what was clearly a geographic battleground in the race, the Fox River Valley - areas including Brown (56% for Obama) and Outagamie (59% for Obama) counties that are heavily Catholic and mostly middle-class and blue-collar.

"Green Bay and down through the Fox Valley is always very important for Democrats in this state," Doyle said. "A Democrat should do well in Milwaukee, and should do well in Madison. But many of these races really do get decided in the Fox Valley."

http://www.jsonline.com/story/index.aspx?id=719960&format=print

Obama Scores 10th Straight Victory

The Associated Press | February 20, 2008

By David Espo

WASHINGTON --

Barack Obama added Wisconsin and Hawaii to a primary season winning streak that now totals 10 and has put Hillary Rodham Clinton into a virtual must-win scenario in Democratic contests coming early next month in Texas and Ohio.

The former first lady now looks to a debate Thursday in Austin, Texas, to stall Obama's momentum and reinvigorate her campaign.

"The change we seek is still months and miles away," Obama told a boisterous crowd in Houston in a speech Tuesday night in which he also pledged to end the war in Iraq in his first year in office.

"I opposed this war in 2002. I will bring this war to an end in 2009. It is time to bring our troops home," he declared.

Sen. John McCain, the Republican front-runner, won a pair of primaries, in Wisconsin and Washington, to continue his march toward certain nomination.

In a race growing increasingly negative, Obama cut deeply into Clinton's political bedrock in Wisconsin, splitting the support of white women almost evenly with her. According to polling place interviews, he also ran well among working class voters in the blue collar battleground that was prelude to primaries in the larger industrial states of Ohio and Pennsylvania.

Clinton congratulated Obama on Wednesday for his two latest victories but dismissed the Illinois senator as leading a movement with little to show for his eloquence and promises.

She depicted Obama's candidacy as a "campaign about a campaign" and cast herself as a champion of the middle class in a speech to a fundraiser at New York's Hunter College. "Others might be joining a movement. I'm joining you on the night shift, on the day shift," Clinton said to applause and cheers.

In a clear sign of their relative standing in the race, most cable television networks abruptly cut away Tuesday night from coverage of Clinton speaking in Youngstown, Ohio, when Obama began to speak in Texas.

McCain easily won the Republican primary in Wisconsin with 55 percent of the vote, dispatching former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee and edging closer to the 1,191 delegates he needs to clinch the GOP nomination at the party convention in St. Paul, Minn. next summer. The Arizona senator also won the primary in Washington, where 19 delegates were at stake, with 49 percent of the vote in incomplete results.

McCain's total moved to 942; Huckabee has 245, in The Associated Press count.

In scarcely veiled criticism of Obama, the Republican nominee-in-waiting said, "I will fight every moment of every day in this campaign to make sure that Americans are not deceived by an eloquent but empty call for change."

McCain stepped up his criticism of Obama on Wednesday, suggesting the Democrat doesn't have the experience or judgment on foreign policy and defense matters needed in a president.

"There are a lot of national security challenges and I know how to handle them. Senator Obama wants to bomb Pakistan without talking to the Pakistanis. I think that's dangerous," McCain said in an interview on ABC's "Good Morning America." "I think that's an important factor _ experience and judgment. Ready to serve and no on the job training."

McCain's nomination has been assured since Super Tuesday three weeks ago, as first one, then another of his former rivals has dropped out and the party establishment has closed ranks behind him.

Not so in the Democratic race, where Obama and Clinton campaign seven days a week, he the strongest black presidential candidate in history, she bidding to become the first woman to sit in the White House.

Ohio and Texas vote next on March 4 _ 370 convention delegates in all _ and even some of Clinton's supporters concede she must win one, and possibly both, to remain competitive. Two smaller states, Vermont and Rhode Island, also have primaries that day.

With the votes counted in all but one of Wisconsin's 3,570 precincts, Obama won 58 percent of the vote to 41 percent for Clinton.

With 100 percent of the vote counted in Hawaii, Obama had 76 percent to Clinton's 24 percent.

Wisconsin offered 74 national convention delegates. There were 20 delegates at stake in Hawaii, where Obama spent much of his youth.

Washington Democrats voted in a primary, too, but their delegates were picked earlier in the month in caucuses won by Obama.

The Illinois senator's victories in Wisconsin and Hawaii left him with 1,336 delegates in The AP count, compared with 1,251 for Clinton, a margin that masks his 155-delegate lead among those picked in primaries or caucuses. It takes 2,025 to win the nomination at the party's national convention in Denver.

Obama's victory came after a week in which Clinton and her aides tried to knock him off stride. They criticized him in television commercials and accused him of plagiarism for using words first uttered by Massachusetts Gov. Deval Patrick, a friend. He shrugged off the advertising volley, and said that while he should have given Patrick credit, the controversy didn't amount to much.

The voters seemed not to care.

Wisconsin independents cast about one-quarter of the ballots in the race between Obama and Clinton, and roughly 15 percent of the electorate were first-time voters, the survey at polling places said. Obama has run strongly among independents in earlier primaries, and among younger voters, and cited their support as evidence that he would make a stronger general election candidate in the fall.

Obama began the evening with eight straight primary and caucus victories, a remarkable run that has propelled him past Clinton in the overall delegate race and enabled him to chip away at her advantage among elected officials within the party who will have convention votes as superdelegates.

The economy and trade were key issues in the race, and seven in 10 voters said international trade has resulted in lost jobs in Wisconsin. Fewer than one in five said trade has created more jobs than it has lost.

The Democrats' focus on trade was certain to intensify, with primaries in Ohio in two weeks and in Pennsylvania on April 22.

Obama's campaign has already distributed mass mailings critical of Clinton on the issue in Ohio. "Bad trade deals like NAFTA hit Ohio harder than most states. Only Barack Obama consistently opposed NAFTA," it said.

Clinton's aides initially signaled she would virtually concede Wisconsin, and the former first lady spent less time in the state than Obama.

Even so, she ran a television ad that accused her rival of ducking a debate in the state and added that she had the only health care plan that would cover all Americans and the only economic plan to stop home foreclosures. "Maybe he'd prefer to give speeches than have to answer questions" the commercial said.

Obama countered with an ad of his own, saying his health care plan would cover more people.

Unlike the Democratic race, McCain was assured of the Republican nomination and concentrated on turning his primary campaign into a general election candidacy.

In one sign of progress in unifying the party, he split the conservative vote with Huckabee in Wisconsin.

Huckabee parried occasional suggestions _ none of them by McCain _ that he quit the race. In a move that was unorthodox if not unprecedented for a presidential contender, he left the country in recent days to make a paid speech in the Grand Cayman Islands.

McCain picked up endorsements in the days before the primary from former President George H.W. Bush and former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney, a campaign dropout who urged his 280 delegates to swing behind the party's nominee-to-be.

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