According to the Pennsylvania Department of State the Clinton win was by:
9.2% (rounded down to 9% with 99.99% of precincts reporting as of April 22)
Therefore the result was not the much needed ‘double-digit’ win the media has eagerly quoted, along with Hillary Clinton herself.
Allowances can be made for Clinton campaign spin, and as of writing this comment the CNN Election Centre still has a misleading 10% margin displayed.
From CNN’s own numbers, with 100% reporting and last updated on April 24, Hillary Clinton received 54.64% of the vote whilst Barack Obama received 45.36%. That is a not too dissimilar margin of:
9.3% (9.29%)
These small differences are not insignificant when you consider that the primary attracted over 2.3 million voters.
In their defence CNN did comment on this very thing on their Political Ticker: http://politicalticker.blogs.cnn.com/2008/04/24/was-pennsylvania-a-double-digit-clinton-win-or-not/
So Hillary’s Pennsylvania win wasn’t the 10% ‘double digit’ win it is supposed to be, what does that matter? She still won, and 9.3% is still impressive.
The problem is that what the media has ignored whilst lapping up the usual ‘comeback kid’ clichés, and a plethora of ‘electability’ arguments, is that Obama halved Hillary’s lead in Pennsylvania and as you correctly state “It is not a major surprise that Hillary won here”.
I remember reading a bunch of articles before Pa. that indicated Hillary would almost definitely win, and substantially at that, commenting that the race was an uphill struggle for Obama. I remember one of the most telling arguments for me was made by Carrie Budoff Brown at the Politico in her article ‘Dyanasty: Not a dirty word in Pa.’ on March 22 (a full month before the primary).
http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0308/9165.html
When you take that into account and look at the polling at RealClearPolitics and Pollster.com it provides a clearer picture of what Obama managed to accomplish in Pennsylvania.
Although before any ascendancy by the Obama campaign and before the win in Iowa, Quinnipiac in October 2007 was saying: “She has a Democratic primary lead over Sen. Obama ranging from 27 to 34 points in Florida, Ohio and Pennsylvania...”
http://www.quinnipiac.edu/x2882.xml?ReleaseID=1109
In this graph of the race you can see how it visibly narrowed in a state where Clinton benefited from some obvious advantages:
http://www.pollster.com/08PAPresDemsZOOMr.php
The Obama campaign has been trying to counter that it made some significant inroads with demographics in the state in some of its campaign emails. One of which can be seen here:(http://www.politicalvoiceblogs.com/2008/04/23/message-from-david-plouffe-the-facts/)
The consequence of all this is that the Clinton campaign has benefited from an imaginary double digit win, whilst the media perpetuates the Clinton charge that Obama ‘cannot seal the deal’ when his campaign in fact halved her lead (leaving out his 3-1 spending advantage - the effectiveness of TV advertising is proven to be limited in changing voters opinions [see the book: Freakonomics] - considering the characterisitcs of Pennsylvania).
It is unlikely that Obama will benefit from such a media boost when he likely wins a ‘locked-up’ state of his own in North Carolina on May 6.
I think this more a case of the media wanting the horse-race to continue and therefore over-valuing the Pennsylvania win, than a serious belief that Clinton’s campaign can bounce-back this late in the race.
