Reply #5: Clinton Take on Pennsylvania Is Increasingly Detached From Reality

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Clinton Take on Pennsylvania Is Increasingly Detached From Reality

by Steve Kornacki | March 13, 2008

The Clinton campaign released a memo yesterday whose first line read: “The path to 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue goes through Pennsylvania so if Barack Obama can't win there, how will he win the general election?”

...Obama, in the likely event he does lose Pennsylvania in April, can win it in the fall, just as he can win every other swing state that Clinton has carried. Even though he lost Ohio, for instance, he fares no worse than Clinton there against McCain. And in both New Mexico and Nevada, smaller but still potentially important swing states, Obama runs 16 points better against McCain than Clinton—even though Clinton beat Obama in both during the primary season. It can not be said enough: There is no correlation between winning a state’s primary and winning it in the general election.

But the most historically ignorant claim in the memo came later on: “No Democrat has won the presidency without winning Pennsylvania since 1948. And no candidate has won the Democratic nomination without winning Pennsylvania since 1972.”

The second part is demonstrably false. Ted Kennedy beat Jimmy Carter in the 1980 Pennsylvania primary, but it was Carter who won the nomination. (Carter did win a few more delegates in the state than Kennedy—but, as they told us after Nevada and Texas, this is not the criteria that the Clinton campaign favors in declaring who wins or loses a state.)

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