Today’s Washington Post has a fascinating article that details the Obama campaign’s strategy throughout the primary process.  The focus on small caucus states appears to have two causes: first, the campaign sought to compete where Clinton was weakest; second, the campaign focused on exploiting the electoral rules to grab every spare delegate.  The former reason motivated the campaign to send volunteers and staffers to small, solidly Republican states like Alaska and Kansas, where the campaign could beat the Clinton machine for the hearts of those voters, many of whom rarely get a chance to play a role in Democratic Party presidential politics.  The latter reason caused the campaign to zero-in on the different delegate formulas.  For example, the story explains that Obama won more pledged delegates from Nevada than did Clinton, even though she won the vote in the state, because his support was concentrated in districts in which an odd-number delegates could be given.  The strategy certainly paid off, although just barely.  Another factor that the article does not mention is the psychological role of winning primary (or caucus) after primary. Obama rattled off a string of 10 primary and caucus victories after Super Tuesday; the news coverage produced by that string, even though some (Utah and Nebraska) of those states were small, heavily-Republican states, was incredibly important to convince super delegates and voters that Obama was winning the nomination.  This undoubtedly helped his candidacy’s viability and his own electability image.

I have a few more thoughts about this whole nomination process.  In no particular order…

• PR (proportional representation) is, in general, a terrible electoral system.  PR may be suited for national legislatures (although I think it’s a bad system for electing anyone), but the Democratic Party should be ashamed of itself for designing a nomination process based on PR.  The point of a nomination process is NOT to express all viewpoints, or to give as many factions within the party delegates; the point is to nominate a presidential candidate, to choose one winner.  A PR-based nomination process is sheer idiocy.
• A state party nomination system, designed to reflect the choice of the party members of a particular state, should reward the candidate who wins that state with the most delegates.  A system that produces the result in Nevada and Texas is a broken one (where Obama lost the popular vote but won more delegates than Clinton).
• Institutions matter.  The Obama campaign played the game shrewdly – capitalizing on the rules of the game and the delegate math.  Clinton could (and should) have done the same.  But the electoral system shaped this outcome, and, as usual, the politician the best understood the system and the incentives inherent in the structure of the system  came out on top.
• In passing, the WP article cites David Axelrod, a chief Obama strategist, as forming the strategy of campaign based more on “personality than policy.”  A wise move when your candidate is Obama and you are campaigning against Hillary Clinton, not because Clinton is good at policy, but because she is so unlikeable.  The big question is: Will the same strategy work against a much more personally-appealing candidate in John McCain?  Goodness, I hope not…