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Is the Hillary camp backing itself into a corner?

James Forsyth

Tuesday, 12th February 2008

It is widely expected that Hillary Clinton will get thumped in today’s three primaries and it is telling that she’ll be in Texas tonight when the results come in. Obama won’t be in any of the states voting today either. Instead, he’ll be in Wisconsin which votes next week. The fact Hillary is leaving the field clear for him there--she’s campaigning all day Wednesday in Texas--reflects her team’s new strategy which is to write off February and bounce back with wins in Texas and Ohio on March 4th.

This is a risky move, to put it mildly. Having placed so much emphasis on these states, Hillary will find it nigh on impossible to recover if she loses both of them. If she does, she can expect senior members of the party to start calling on her to drop out.

The conventional wisdom used to be that Texas and Ohio were ideal states for Clinton. Ohio is full of voters who should respond to Clinton’s economic message and Texas has a large Latino population, to date Latino voters have stayed solidly behind Hillary. But at a second glance these states don’t appear such a lock for Hillary. First, both are open primaries and given that the Republican race is effectively over, Obama can expect large numbers of independents and Republicans to cross over and vote for him. Also, Texas--with the complicated way that it allocates its delegates--plays to the Obama campaign’s organisational strengths while Ohio has a tiny Latino population. Add to this the fact that Obama does best where he has campaigned longest--he’ll have two straight weeks to barnstorm across these states--and we might find that this race is effectively settled before the convention after all.