Also In This Issue Cover Story: Battlefield Now · The Hispanic Vote: The Building Bloc

By Ronald Brownstein, National Journal
© National Journal Group Inc.
Monday, Feb. 4, 2008

LOS ANGELES -- Every major plot twist in the Democratic presidential race is converging, fittingly enough, in the hometown of Hollywood and the movie industry. Tuesday's California primary captures in microcosm almost all of the forces shaping the epic struggle between Hillary Rodham Clinton and Barack Obama.

The state's vast, and vastly diverse, Democratic electorate includes large numbers of all the groups that have powered Obama's rise: young people; affluent, well-educated whites; independents; and African-Americans. But many of Clinton's strongest groups are prominent as well: Latinos could cast one-fifth of the votes in next week's Democratic contest, and women perhaps as many as three-fifths.

Similarly, the state could provide an especially revealing backdrop for the contending arguments driving the race. The struggle will measure the relative strength of Obama's call for political reform and national unity against Clinton's focus on kitchen-table concerns at a time when economic anxiety is spiking, both locally and nationally. And in a state where much of the Democratic establishment has aligned solidly behind Clinton (but where voters often favor candidates who break the mold), the race will provide another gauge of whether rank-and-file Democrats are placing greater value on change or experience, charisma or savvy, incandescence or perseverance.

What's more, California is the only mega-state voting on February 5 that represents something approaching neutral ground -- in contrast to Illinois, considered Obama territory (even though Clinton was born in Chicago) because he represents it in the Senate, and to New York and New Jersey, which favor Clinton.

The reverberations of Obama's upsetting Clinton in California -- a state that anchored the general election coalition of her husband, Bill Clinton -- would be huge. Alternatively, if Clinton wins California, New York, and New Jersey, she seems likely to emerge from Super Tuesday re-established as the front-runner, barring a virtually complete Obama sweep everywhere else. "Either way, California is going to be very, very important from the momentum aspect," says John Emerson, a leading Democratic activist in Los Angeles who is backing Clinton.

California also offers the contenders something more tangible than momentum. It will select 370 pledged delegates to the Democratic National Convention -- far more than any other February 5 state and more than one-fifth of the national total to be allocated on that day. "With so many delegates [at stake], you are always going to compete here," says Mitchell Schwartz, Obama's state director. "It's not spin. No one is going to give up on it."

Local observers almost uniformly give Clinton the edge, largely because of the California Democratic electorate's female tilt but also because of her solid ties to the Latino community and the reservoir of goodwill toward Bill Clinton. Four surveys completed before Obama's big win in South Carolina last Saturday showed Hillary Clinton holding a double-digit advantage here. But polling this weekend generally showed the race much closer and within reach for either candidate.

Obama has built a solid base of support in California, as reflected by his enormous volunteer corps and his surprising success at nearly matching Clinton in fundraising, according to the most recent Federal Election Commission statistics. His supporters remain confident that Obama will benefit from the state's affinity for change and for politicians with an unconventional streak. Those were the forces that carried insurgent Gary Hart to an upset victory over another establishment favorite, Walter Mondale, in 1984 -- the last time the state's Democratic presidential primary truly mattered.

For many California Democrats, the duel between Clinton and Obama is the most riveting competition since then, if not since the tragic 1968 race in which Robert F. Kennedy defeated Eugene McCarthy before being assassinated on Election Night.

In the current contest, John Edwards had attracted some significant backing, particularly from the politically potent state affiliate of the Service Employees International Union. But his support in recent California polls barely cracked double digits even before his disappointing third-place finish in South Carolina. After Edwards withdrew from the race on Wednesday, the state SEIU, his most valuable California asset, quickly endorsed Obama. So did the Los Angeles Times, the state's largest newspaper.

"If the election were held today, Hillary Clinton would win," says Cathy Calfo, a Democratic operative who served as campaign manager for Phil Angelides, the party's 2006 gubernatorial nominee. "But you have this potential of a wild-card factor [for Obama] that just ignites a desire ... for hope and belief and enthusiasm. That's not something you can measure in polls."

Women Calling Women
On a cold and rainy evening two weeks before Super Tuesday, a dozen women gathered at the home of Robyn Ritter Simon in the Beverlywood neighborhood just south of Beverly Hills. They were part of a Clinton voter-outreach program known as BYOP, for "bring your own phone."

The women were a diverse group: older, younger, family friends, political acquaintances from Simon's work as president of the West Los Angeles branch of the National Women's Political Caucus. After they arrived at her comfortable home, they were fortified with lasagna, salad, wine, and instructions from a young Clinton staffer who gave them lists of female voters over age 40 who had placed themselves on a state roster to automatically receive absentee ballots for each election.

For the next two hours, while children wandered in and out and the ebullient Simon buzzed through the house offering encouragement, the women scattered across the living room, dining room, family room, kitchen, and even a stairway in search of the best signals for their cellphones. By night's end, they had contacted dozens of prospective voters and exchanged yelps of congratulation each time they reached a supporter.

Simon and some others arranged to join another BYOP party a few nights later. "The day she entered the race I was 100 percent committed," Simon recalls. "There wasn't even a discussion."

To a surprising extent, both Clinton and Obama have placed their California fate in the hands of volunteers like these. That's a remarkable development in a state so large. The 2000 and 2004 California Democratic presidential primaries each drew about 3 million voters. With the stakes and voter interest higher this year, the campaigns predict that 4 million or more Democrats and independents will vote next week. Compounding the challenge, the contenders must compete in all corners of the state because about two-thirds of the pledged delegates will be awarded based on the candidates' performance in each congressional district; the statewide result will decide the rest.

Yet the campaigns are pursuing California voters with only a fraction of the paid staff and television advertising that they poured into Iowa and New Hampshire. From mid-January through this Sunday, Clinton and Obama together had spent about $3.6 million on California TV spots, according to figures compiled by TNS Media Intelligence/Campaign Media Analysis Group. But that isn't much money in a state where a single candidate typically must spend at least $3 million a week to effectively reach voters. "There is no question that the concentration of people and money in the early states will dwarf ... the resources expended in much larger states" voting on February 5, says Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa, a prominent Clinton supporter.

That reality has forced the Clinton and Obama campaigns to organize enormous volunteer efforts. The Clinton drive began last May with the hiring of Averell (Ace) Smith, a veteran California political operative. Under Smith's direction, the campaign has built a pyramid organization, with 1,700 highly committed "Hillstar" volunteers who recruited as many as 25,000 to 30,000 additional volunteers, who in turn provided the names of friends and acquaintances to target.

Obama's campaign has recruited and trained more than 5,000 precinct captains, who organize house parties and coordinate volunteer phone banks. With tens of thousands of additional volunteers enlisting at Obama events or through his website, the campaign estimates that as many as 7,000 Californians are each devoting at least 40 hours per week to their organizing effort. "It is a movement we got going on here," says Schwartz, another veteran California operative.

Edwards had nothing close to these organizations. Instead, he had relied largely on SEIU's outreach to its 650,000 California members, as well as on similar efforts by unions representing carpenters, steelworkers, and transport workers. Beyond the unions, Edwards had 40,000 identified supporters who were contacting their personal networks without much direction from the campaign.

Both Clinton and Obama have targeted much of their volunteer energy on the state's legions of absentee voters, another valuable piece of California's complex electoral puzzle. Nearly 2 million Democrats have signed up to automatically receive absentee ballots, as have hundreds of thousands of independents, who are also eligible to vote in next week's Democratic primary.

In the Democrats' 2004 presidential primary, these absentees cast about one-third of the ballots; in the 2006 gubernatorial primary, that figure soared to nearly 47 percent. This year's absentee voters received their ballots on January 7, compelling both of the leading candidates to essentially run monthlong get-out-the vote campaigns. "You have to throw out the book and change the way you think about elections," says Smith, Clinton's state director. "In California, Election Day is not February 5; the election starts on January 7. We are having our election as we speak."

Reflecting that reality, Obama's campaign volunteers have called 300,000 absentees who voted regularly in recent primaries; the Clinton campaign has focused on women over 40 and Latinos. Clinton's campaign strategists, and most neutral local analysts, think that the greater the early vote, the more it benefits her. And this week's Los Angeles Times poll showed Clinton with a resounding advantage of 43 percentage points among those who had already voted. But the Obama camp took heart from a Gallup Poll this week indicating that only about 20 percent of California Democrats had in fact voted before Obama's decisive win in South Carolina. If Gallup is correct, Obama could still threaten Clinton here -- provided the wave he generated in South Carolina reaches all the way to the other coast.

A New Combo
In many ways, the competition between Clinton and Obama echoes the Mondale-Hart race here a quarter-century ago, though with intriguing racial and gender twists. Like Hart, Obama is relying primarily on a "new politics" coalition of young voters; well-educated, upscale liberals; and independents drawn to a reform message and an appeal that relies more on dynamism than a lengthy resume.

That's a favorable lane to hold in a state where college graduates and voters who earn at least $60,000 a year are likely to cast a clear majority of Democratic primary ballots. Obama could also benefit from the fact that independents are barred from Tuesday's GOP primary.

"Californians like things that are new," says former state Controller Steve Westly, the co-chairman of Obama's California campaign. "We are comfortable with risk. We don't like establishment candidates, establishment anything. We are the most multicultural place on the planet, and the fact that Obama has this unique personal story ... and is a multicultural figure and is younger and is new and different -- I just think he's going to do extremely well."

The twist for Obama is that, if the pattern from earlier states continues, he will also dominate the African-American vote here. That means that he could, in effect, combine the 1984 constituencies of Hart and Jesse Jackson -- a new combination in state Democratic politics.

Like Mondale, Clinton is attempting to mobilize a more traditional Democratic coalition of blue-collar families and older voters around a message focused on bread-and-butter economic concerns. But she enjoys two demographic advantages that Mondale lacked. The first is her gender, a considerable asset in a state where women cast fully 58 percent of the vote in the 2006 Democratic gubernatorial primary, according to a Los Angeles Times exit poll. Most California surveys have found Obama remaining close to Clinton among men but trailing badly among women.

The second is the rising prominence of Hispanics. In 1984, exit polls found that Latinos cast just 9 percent of the Democratic vote, only half the share of African-Americans. Now those numbers have flipped. In the 2006 gubernatorial primary, Hispanics cast 18 percent of the vote, and African-Americans contributed only 8 percent.

The Hispanic share could hit 20 percent this year. And that could be a huge advantage for Clinton, who carried Hispanics by more than 2-to-1 in Nevada and consistently attracts about three-fifths of Latinos in polls here. Obama has recruited some prominent Hispanic supporters, including state Senate Majority Leader Gloria Romero and Maria Elena Durazo, executive secretary-treasurer of the powerful Los Angeles County Federation of Labor, but Clinton has won most of the community's biggest names, including Villaraigosa, state Assembly Speaker Fabian Nunez, and Dolores Huerta, a co-founder of the United Farm Workers union. "I think what you'll see here is, her [Hispanic] support will be upwards of 60 percent," Villaraigosa predicts.

Clinton's strength among Latinos is rooted in her husband's continuing popularity in that community and her focus on the material needs that usually move these voters. But many local observers say that Obama faces an additional hurdle because of tensions between California Hispanics and African-Americans over jobs, government services, and political power. "Some Latino voters simply will not support an African-American candidate," says Jaime Regalado, director of the Pat Brown Institute of Public Affairs at California State University (Los Angeles). "That is fading, but it is still a residual factor."

As the icing for Clinton's cake, most California polls have shown her running even with or leading Obama among upscale voters, a constituency that has mostly preferred him in the early states. But the most recent surveys have shown Obama within reach of an upset. To truly challenge Clinton in California, he will need to narrow her advantage among Latinos. He will also need a surge of participation among young people and independents, who have favored him in most other states. Most of all, he'll almost certainly need to carry college-educated women, a huge voting bloc here. These women oscillated between Obama and Clinton in the early-state contests.

The great unknown is how strong a connection those -- or any other -- voters feel to their candidate in a race that most Californians have experienced only at a distance. Because Clinton is leading, she probably benefits from the campaigns' inability to spend anything near the sums that candidates usually devote to advertising and organizing in statewide races here.

But that lack of direct contact between the campaigns and the voters also means that opinions could prove volatile in the election's final days. Julie Goodman, a freelance writer in Los Angeles, felt early tremors when making calls for Clinton at Simon's house. "I am actually surprised at how many are not ready to commit," Goodman said as she dialed through her list of female targets. "I sort of feel it may be decided by the last person who talks to them or the last article they read."