I wondered yesterday why so many Hillary Clinton supporters in Indiana and North Carolina said they wouldn’t vote for Barack Obama if he were the nominee. What I really wondered was if race was a factor in that.

Well Jed Lewison has a pretty good explanation of the phenomenon. The one-time aide to Sen. Maria Cantwell pushed himself away from the Vegas poker tables long enough to send me an explanation of the role of the “McCain Meddlers.”

From the exit poll, 1 in 8 Indiana Clinton voters and 1 in 6 North Carolina Indiana voters will not vote for Clinton even if she wins the nomination. These are the “McCain meddlers.”

If you factor them out (also subtracting the McCain meddlers who supported Obama), Obama wins Indiana by 3 and North Carolina by 22.

So what Lewison is saying is that no one should draw too much from the fact that Clinton supporters say they won’t back Obama, because a chunk of them aren’t really Democratic supporters.
And as he writes at The Jed Report:

By the books, there's no taking away Clinton's Indiana victory, but it is worth remember that it was only made possible by voters who have no intention of voting for a Democrat in the fall.

He explains his methodology here.

And more importantly, who does former U.S. House Speaker Tom Foley back for president? Foley, a former member of Congress from Spokane, is one of Washington's superdelegates. As the race for the Democratic nomination finally begins to wind down more attention is being paid to who superdelegates are backing.

But no one seems to know for sure where Foley stands. Some sites that track superdelegates show him as a Clinton backer. (He was U.S. ambassador to Japan under President Clinton.) But other sites and news organizations show Foley as uncommitted.

Has anyone seen anything directly from Foley on this question?

The state Republican Party is recommending, but not requiring, local GOP officials to endorse candidates in contested primaries. That’s a more laissez faire approach than what state Democrats have done. State Democratic Party Chairman Dwight Pelz has said local party organizations are required to pick among Democrats in contested races and vote to give one candidate an official endorsement.

Pelz has been disappointed that a few local Democratic organizations balked at endorsing candidates.

The nominating conventions are the parties’ response to the first-ever top-two primary scheduled for August. In that election, they party has no way to identify its preferred candidate and the top two vote getters, regardless of party, advance to the November ballot. Candidates endorsed by party organizations can show that in the voter’s pamphlet, but not on the ballot.

Republican Party Chairman Luke Esser said the GOP state committee shares Pelz’ concern about the party having a say in who is nominated. But, he told me yesterday, some felt uncomfortable requiring county and legislative district organizations to nominate a favored candidate.

It can be a little bit challenging to extraordinarily painful for a grassroots organization to go through selecting among different Republican candidates.

That’s particularly true in a heavily Republican district where the November ballot would be likely to include two party members facing off. The party has at least two eastern Washington legislative districts with multiple Republicans running in primaries.

The 117-member State Committee met Saturday to approve the nominating rules. The committee also voted to endorse the three incumbent Republican statewide officials and the three Republicans in the state’s Congressional delegation.

In addition, gubernatorial candidate Dino Rossi and state treasurer candidate Allan Martin were endorsed.

Democratic leaders have pushed nominating conventions both as a way to give the party it’s say in the primaries, but also as part of a legal strategy as challenges continue against the top-two primary. Esser said he shares those concerns.

That does make sense. One of the reasons that we went ahead with the nominating process on fairly short notice is to recognize that we’re in the middle of a lawsuit and we needed to send a message that we take this very seriously, and we are concerned about confusion between the officially endorsed Republican candidates and other Republican candidates.

Esser said that allowing the locals to decide whether to hold nominating conventions should not hurt the party’s standing in the legal fight against the primary.

Congressman Rick Larsen, D-Lake Stevens, says he’s a Democratic superdelegate committed to Sen. Barack Obama.

Larsen has been neutral in the race between Obama and Sen. Hillary Clinton. He's holding a conference call with reporters right now. Larsen said:

This week Sen. Obama has proven that he is tough and resilient. He has shown that he can take a pounding but come back and communicate with the public to deliver his message of hope and change.

He said that he's been "particulary impressed by Senator Obama's truth-telling on the proposed gas tax holiday." Clinton supported a temporary suspension of the gas tax, but Obama called that pandering. Larsen said a tax holiday would "make little or no difference for Americans paying too much at the pump."

Larsen said that “as great as it sounds,” the gas tax holiday would save drivers about 31 cents a day, but take billions away from transportation projects across the country.

By definition, to me, it really looked like someone trying to create voters where votes didn’t exist. … It says to me that at least Senator Obama had the fortitude to call this gas tax holiday what it is, a gimmick.

Larsen said that early in the primary race he was leaning toward endorsing Clinton, and had also thought about endorsing New Mexico Gov. Bill Richardson.

Still left uncommitted among Washington’s superdelegates are state Democratic Party Chairman Dwight Pelz and Vice Chairwoman Eileen Macoll; Democratic National Committee members Ed Cote, Sharon Mast and David McDonald; and Congressman Jim McDermott.

McDermott is the last neutral superdelegate among the state’s elected Democrats.

As recently as April 23, Larsen was saying he had no plans to choose sides before all states had a chance to vote in primaries or caucuses. He said then:

I haven't changed my view at all that we should let the states play themselves out.

Larsen said today that he, as well as other superdelegates, were impressed by Obama’s performance in the Indiana and North Carolina primaries. It was, he said using a Clinton phrase, a “game-changer” and it “put a lot of uncommitted delegates into head-scratching mode” about what to do.

He met with Obama today in D.C. about an hour before his 2 p.m. conference all began. Larsen had already decided to endorse Obama, but he wanted to talk to the candidate about the state of the race and to raise a few Washington state issues, including the Boeing tanker deal.

Politico has a great national superdelegate tracker here.

There are a total of 796 superdelegates, including 17 in Washington. That's about 20 percent of the total delegates. In Washington, the superdelegates backing Clinton are U.S. Senators Patty Murray and Maria Cantwell, Congressmen Norm Dicks and Jay Inslee, former House Speaker Tom Foley, and King County Executive Ron Sims.

Those backing Obama are Congressmen Adam Smith and Brian Baird, Gov. Chris Gregoire, and DNC member Pat Notter.

Larsen has been critical of the power the party gives to superdelegates.

I’m still no fan of the superdelegate process. That doesn’t mean I’m not a superdelegate, I still am. And it is more and more clear that the superdelegates are going to decide the nomination. That said, we’re not going to be doing it in a … smoke-filled back room. … Superdelegates are going to come out one by one and make their decision.

Well, the actual USA Today headline this morning says "Clinton makes case for wide appeal." But the way Hillary Clinton's comments are being anaylzed this morning it is clear many think she has made a new, and stark, appeal as the candidate for whites.

Here’s what Clinton said, in what is certainly the most-discussed story of the day:

“I have a much broader base to build a winning coalition on,” she said in an interview with USA TODAY. As evidence, Clinton cited an Associated Press article “that found how Sen. Obama’s support among working, hard-working Americans, white Americans, is weakening again, and how whites in both states who had not completed college were supporting me.”

Eli asks at The Slog:

Is Clinton really staying in the race to become the candidate of that portion of white, Democratic America that won’t for the black guy?

Clinton strategists held a conference call yesterday to talk about the Indiana and North Carolina results. Geoff Garin talked about the role race played. Says Greg Sargent at Talking Points Memo:

Put in the context of the Hillary campaign's chief argument that she's the more electable Dem, Garin's overall implication here is that her success among white voters in North Carolina yesterday is "progress" in the sense that it strengthens her case for electability.

In other words, it's an explicit, and unabashed, linking of her claim of electability to her success among whites.

There is something jarring about hearing Clinton talk about her appeal among whites. And that likely has more to do with it coming out of the mouth of the candidate than the reality that campaigns analyze the electorate along racial lines. That's not news.

As the University of Virginia’s Larry Sabato told USA Today:

Clinton's comment was a "poorly worded" variation on the way analysts have been "slicing and dicing the vote in racial terms."

But there is another trend in recent exit polls that has me wondering if race is playing an unstated role among Clinton supporters. From CNN:

According to the exit polls, half of Clinton's supporters in Indiana would not vote for Obama in a general election match up with John McCain. A third of Clinton voters said they would pick McCain over Obama, while 17 percent said they would not vote at all. Just 48 percent of Clinton supporters said they would back Obama in November.

Obama gets even less support from Clinton backers in North Carolina. There, only 45 percent of Clinton supporters said they would vote for Obama over McCain. Thirty-eight percent said they would vote for McCain while 12 percent said they would not vote.

Those percentages are higher than those that say race played a role in their decision to support Clinton over Obama. But voters would be reluctant to tell a pollster directly that they used race as a deciding factor. But if so many backers of the white candidate say they would refuse to back the black candidate, one has to wonder if what is being unsaid.

Obama voters appear to be more willing to support Clinton in November. In Indiana, 59 percent of Obama backers said they'd vote for Clinton, and 70 percent of Obama backers in North Carolina said they'd support the New York Democrat.

Throughout the primary season, I figured that just the opposite would be true. Clinton supporters were more traditional Democrats and if their candidate wasn’t the nominee they would be likely to support Obama, even if they thought he was less prepared than their first choice. Obama supporters, I thought, may just decide to stay home if their guy didn’t win because many are new to the party and to politics and much more drawn by the phenomenon surrounding Obama.

I’m obviously wrong about that. But it’s not at all clear yet why Clinton supporters are so reluctant to switch their allegiance to Obama.

UPDATE: A smart guy I know e-mailed to say that race is certainly part of the answer to why those Clinton supporters say they won’t vote for Obama come November.

But he also suggests that part of that is the sour feeling some of them have as Clinton’s chances slip away. He said some of those people feel like a beleaguered minority - and acknowledged the irony of that - but that their frustration will eventually dissipate and many will come around to back Obama.

That makes sense to me. What do you think?

When I stopped live-blogging last night Hillary Clinton had just won Indiana and declared:

“It's full-speed on to the White House."

But this morning’s headlines tell a far different story.

• Clinton Aides Doubtful About Future
• For Clinton, Options Seem to Dwindle
• Pundits Declare the Race Over
• 'The night the music died' - and the general election began
• Clinton’s Longevity in Jeopardy After Indiana Squeaker
• OBAMA VS MCCAIN
• Reality Has Well-Known Obama Bias

Clinton won Indiana, but she lost the punditocracy. She’s even lost Drudge, who the Clinton campaign has been working hard to massage. He says simply under a photo of Obama and his wife, Michelle, walking hand-in-hand,

THE NOMINEE

But she’ll always have Rush. Given the close finish in Indiana, it is certainly possible that Limbaugh’s Operation Chaos helped Clinton eke out her win.

Operation Chaos Field Reports: Chaos Reigns Across Fruited Plain!

I have also been receiving field reports via e-mail today, both at my website e-mail address and the ElRushbo@eibnet.com address, from people, commandos, operatives reporting that they have followed orders and fulfilled their duty. Nobody's been challenged. In fact, the Indiana voters all say that they have not been challenged, and they were hoping to be. They had themselves steeled and ready for it, many of them have shown up in tie-dyes, flip-flops, holding their heads up, looking down at their noses like they're liberals, effete snobs, showing up in battered pickup trucks and this sort of thing.

Operation chaos is also a great marketing tool for Rush. I'm not sure what those T-shirts will be worth if Clinton drops out.

Congressman Dave Reichert, R-Auburn, is on Roll Call's list of the 10 most vulnerable members of Congress. Here's what Josh Kurtz says about him:

It's tough to go from hero cop to endangered incumbent in such a short stretch of time, but that's the former King County sheriff's fate in a suburban Seattle district that is steadily becoming more Democratic. Reichert still has a reservoir of good will to draw from as he fights off Democrat Darcy Burner for the second straight cycle. But Burner has become a more polished and confident campaigner -- and has outpaced the incumbent on the fundraising front for the past few quarters.