What Will Super Tuesday Bring?

Plus Alaska and American Samoa

Super Tuesday states. Obama has had incredible momentum since South Carolina, and he's been making big polling gains on Two-For-The-Price-Of-One Clinton in states like California, Massachusetts and New Jersey. Some of the national polls show them in a statistical dead heat. Still, Clinton may well hang on in California and beyond tomorrow. New Mexico appears to be up for grabs and anybody's guess. Turnout is everything.

Obama is moving up fast but he hasn't crested yet, so he'll probably lose any number of states, most of them by single digits. In some places, not enough people were exposed to him or his wife, Michelle, in time for an out-and-out victory. In others, where early voting is big, many marked their ballots for Hillary before Obama's big mo got going, or they voted for Edwards thinking he'd still be in the race on Super Tuesday.

Obama's Goal: Stay Competitive
The point is that Obama doesn't need to win the majority of states tomorrow to "win" in the long run. What he needs to do is win a few and come close in others to show that Hillary's trajectory has been flat as a pancake since the early contests. Obama must collect enough delegates to stay close and that will equal the equivalent of a victory, for now.

Just two weeks ago polls were predicting a Clinton blow-out in many locales. Now the margins between the two candidates have gotten smaller in some places with each passing day. Given expectations, if Hillary doesn't win big -- as in double digits -- in a significant number of states, the battle for delegates will have just begun. Unless Obama or Clinton has absolutely stunning victories across the board tomorrow, no amount of spin will permit one or the other to justifiably declare they're the big winner. Remember, almost all of the Democratic primaries and caucuses award delegates proportionately, according to the percentages the candidates get in each Congressional district.

If Hillary doesn't dominate on Super Tuesday, her campaign contributions may well begin to fade dramatically. For one thing, her fundraising operation is conventional to the max, meaning most of her contributors are already tapped out because they've given the limit. Meanwhile, it's not unreasonable to assume that Obama's will continue to gush, given the $32 million he raised in January alone, much of it from small and new donors.

Coming Up
The rest of February's Dem contests include states where Obama is expected to do better than Clinton. And he'll have more time to close the deal:

• February 9: Louisiana primary; Nebraska and Washington caucuses
• February 10: Maine caucuses
• February 12: DC, Maryland, Virginia
• February 19: Hawaii, Wisconsin

Obama is now favored in all of those except Maine. Next up, states where Clinton again becomes competitive, and the campaigning should be intense:

• March 4: Ohio, Rhode Island, Texas, Vermont

Then two where Obama is favored, a long gap and then the battleground state of Pennsylvia:

• March 8: Wyoming
• March 11: Mississippi
• April 22: Pennsylvania

I'll stop there, because nobody knows where we'll be by then. Many believe we could go all the way to the August convention in Denver before we have a nominee, unless either campaign collapses or someone makes a huge error. You never know.