Talk Elections

Earlier in the year there was a lot of discussion about how the drawn out Democratic Party nomination process was hurting their chances at winning in November. I'm interested to see whether the Forum's conventional wisdom (https://uselectionatlas.org/FORUM/index.php?topic=72020.0) has shifted on this.

So did the longer process help or hurt the Democrats?
Its your choose!

Impossible to say until after election day whether it helped or didn't affect the race much. It definitely looks like it didn't hurt.

Helped a lot.

Without the lengthy primary, Obama wouldn't campaigned in Virginia, North Carolina, Indiana.

He build a structure for his campaign is these states and in others.

That's an excellent idea. Also, think of the fundraising.

It probably helped. It increased voter registrations and allowed Obama to setup shop in all 50 states. If it had ended early, it may not have happened that way.

Ya, it got Obama into fighting trim, and afforded the time for him to form up his audacious phalanxes.

There are two questions:

1) What would have happend had the primary schedule been more compressed (i.e. the Pennsylvania, Indiana, Kentucky and West Virigina primaries had taken place before Easter)?

2) Would it have been better for Obama to have won the primaries on the same night as McCain rather than in June (i.e. by winning in Texas and Ohio)?

In answer to (1).

I think that had there not been a massive gap between Wrightgate and the Pennslyvania primary, Hillary would have won by 15 points rather than 9 and the Superdelegates who drifted to Obama during that period would have stayed on the sidelines or gone over to Hillary. So, to that extent the massive Easter break helped Obama.

In answer to (2).

The extended primary process also helped Obama on balance. Although it created a lot of buyers remorse in the Democrat's it also created the mirage of the PUMA as a Hillary groupie, rather than as a disaffected Democrat. Given that the need to pander specifically to Clinton voters was one of the main motivating factors behind the disaster that was Palin, I think that the extended primary helped Obama. Also, I think the McCain campaign could have done with boost to morale provided by people paying attention to the McCain leads of nearly 10 points that the polls were reporting at one stage.

However, if we assume NAFTAgate, Bittergate and Reallyproudgate were specifically products of the campaign, and would not have occured if Obama was concentrating on McCain, then the longer campaign was a negative (although only the middle incident was really memorable).

Helped a little, but would have hurt a lot without the financial crisis.