After Virginia and Tennessee

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The results of the Virginia and Tennessee primaries leave the race for the Democratic nomination in pretty clear shape.

John Kerry, with his two wins in the South, is the overwhelming favorite for the nomination. There is no plausible scenario for anyone else unless support for Kerry collapses. He seems to have convinced the bulk of Democratic primary voters who want to beat George W. Bush that he has the best chance to do so. He’s way ahead in the tracking polls in Wisconsin taken February 4–6.

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John Edwards will continue his campaign in Wisconsin. He may be out of money, and he will not have the chance to dazzle an appreciable percentage of Wisconsin Democrats with his in-the-room speechifying skills. But he will get some local and national coverage. If support for Kerry does somehow collapse, he is there as an alternative. If it doesn’t, he’s a plausible, even an attractive, candidate for vice president. His insistence that he would not take that nomination is believed by no one. He’s giving up his Senate seat and has nothing else on his schedule. This, of course, means that Edwards will continue to refrain, as he has so far, from attacks on Kerry. Expect nothing more than gentle reminders that he, Edwards, hasn’t had anything to do with Washington lobbyists; let the voters figure out that someone else (i.e., Kerry) has.

Wesley Clark is through. He said he had to win Tennessee to continue; he finished third there with 23 percent of the vote. Top advisers were ready to ease him out of the race after February 3, with warnings about what happens to candidates who end up with debts they can’t pay off for years. But he carried Oklahoma, and his wife wanted to keep campaigning. He made a wise decision to spend election night in Memphis: It’s only a short distance to Little Rock, Ark., where he withdrew from the race Wednesday afternoon.

Howard Dean will campaign in Wisconsin and is actually putting ads up on the air—something he hasn’t done since New Hampshire January 27. Dean admitted earlier on that he had to win in Wisconsin or quit the race. Then on Monday, he said he would go on regardless of how he does in Wisconsin. He added that he had spoken impulsively before and hadn’t realized what he had said. How he can expect this admission can make even rabid Bush haters think he is fit for the presidency is a mystery.

Dean’s numbers in Wisconsin are awful. The February 4–6 ARG tracking poll shows Kerry with 41 percent, Clark with 15 percent, Edwards with 10 percent, and Dean with 9 percent. Perhaps you could argue that with Clark out, his support will go to Dean. But look at Dean’s favorables/unfavorables in the ARG track: 20 percent favorable and 37 percent unfavorable. And this is among Democratic primary voters. Dean may not know it, but he is in the same position as Dennis Kucinich and Al Sharpton. He can say he’s running, and he can get up enough money for plane fares and even some trappings of a campaign (even Kucinich has a core of faithful supporters willing to cough up money, and Dean has a considerably larger such core). But he’s not going to win many votes—not enough for a speaking spot at the convention. (And what are those worth anyway? Does anyone ever watch or remember such a speech, except when it makes trouble for the nominee, as Pat Buchanan’s did in 1992?)

There are two interesting questions about what Dean does. The first is whether he attacks John Kerry in Wisconsin as a toady to lobbyists. There is plenty of raw material. A Washington Post story identified Kerry as the No. 1 senator in lobbyist contributions over the past 15 years. Then there is the story by ABC News’s Jake Tapper about how Kerry introduced a bill for a Massachusetts company and then was quickly rewarded with contributions at a fundraiser at Boston’s tony Locke-Ober restaurant. There are many more such stories: Check them out on Mickey Kaus’s kausfiles.com. They make utterly laughable Kerry’s claim to be a fighter for the little guy against special interests. Dean ads making this attack won’t help Dean in Wisconsin, or anywhere else. But they could hurt Kerry. Chances are not: Too many Democrats see him as a war hero who can eliminate Bush’s advantage on national security issues. But a rush of such ads and free media stories could conceivably damage Kerry enough to put Edwards in a position to catch up. Remember that Edwards, with his sunny tone and positive ads, positioned himself to benefit from voter disgust with Dick Gephardt’s and Dean’s negative ads in Iowa. Now he’s found himself set up in the same position in Wisconsin. So far, Dean has not taken on Kerry. He is running against the media instead; his first ad states, "The media claims [sic] this contest is over. They expect you to rubber-stamp the choice of others. But you don’t have to listen to them. You have the power to keep this debate alive. You have the power to choose the strongest candidate to beat George W. Bush." This is unlikely to be effective, for Dean anyway; polling evidence suggests few Democratic voters consider him the strongest candidate against Bush, and many consider him the weakest. But Dean has until Friday, when weekend media buys are placed, to take a different tack.

The second interesting question about Dean is whether he makes his E-mail list, with its 500,000 or so names, available to Kerry when the latter has clinched the nomination. His former campaign manager, Joe Trippi, is against doing so. Kerry could certainly use it: Even if half the people on the list delete his messages as spam, some of the others will send in money, which he can use in the period until the Democratic convention. Dean has said many times that he will support the eventual nominee. But his followers regard Dean for America as not just a campaign but a movement, and any political force he may have will be diluted if he just turns over the list to Kerry. Dean is difficult to predict, given his self-acknowledged impulsiveness. He might keep on campaigning Kucinich-like until the convention. He might quit and turn over the E-mail list. Or he might quit at some point but hold tight on to the E-mail list.

Dean set the tone of the campaign last summer, when he started raising huge amounts of money and shooting up in the polls with his vitriolic attacks on Bush and the war in Iraq. That tone has been maintained, notably by Kerry. Now Dean still has the ability to shape the contest, even though it is most likely near the end.

Bush’s job approval

Lately there have been many stories saying that George W. Bush has been falling in the polls. The truth is a little more complicated than that. Let’s look at the poll numbers, as conveniently assembled in realclearpolitics.com, taking the average of several polls conducted between certain dates:

It’s fairly clear what’s happening here. Up through the first 10 days of January, Bush was profiting from the euphoria following the announcement December 14 of the capture of Saddam Hussein. Then, as the focus shifted to the Democrats competing in Iowa and New Hampshire, Bush’s ratings came down but still remained significantly more positive than negative between January 10 and 25. Then, following John Kerry’s big victory in New Hampshire January 27, Bush’s numbers fell, and he started trailing Kerry in some polls. Interestingly, in this period there were only three polls, as compared with six and eight in the other periods. Then, in February, Bush’s rating shot back up to where it was before New Hampshire and after the Saddam Hussein euphoria.

Bush’s current 52 percent job approval is entirely consistent with his being re-elected, though not by a wide margin. But then we know that the country is pretty evenly divided, and Bush’s political strategists have been saying all along that they expect a close election. His current approval numbers look an awful lot like the popular vote for the House of Representatives in November 2002, which was 51 percent Republican and 46 percent Democratic. Democrats are currently swelling with confidence that Kerry will beat Bush. The closeness of the numbers means that result is possible. But the numbers do not show that Bush is in deep trouble, as many Democrats and analysts think.