With 91 percent of the state’s precincts counted, Clinton led Obama 51 percent to 49 percent, with about 20,000 votes separating the two U.S. senators, CNN reported. Votes were reported late coming in from Lake County in northwestern Indiana near Chicago.
from this article @ UPI

Clinton’s earlier reported leads were largely based on the fact that Lake County took its sweet time to report polls, and it was a strong supporter of Obama, as prefigured. Clinton is continuing onwards and upwards. Clinton lost ground by about 8 delegates today and appears in no danger of actually catching up any time soon.

Before flying out of Indiana to Washington DC, as the networks were still agonizing over the rustbelt state, Clinton proclaimed victory there and said it was “full speed on to the White House.”
from here

Clinton appears to be pinning her hopes on using the DLC to beat the DNC into submission over the delegates that were ruled out due to election irregularities (and where she won because she ran unopposed.) The DLC is a subgroup of democrats, more conservative, that is pretty much backing her at this point, and has been ominously waving hands to spoil the election if she doesn’t get the ticket, by sponsoring lots of polls saying that Clinton voters wouldn’t vote for Obama.

The DLC is doing a lot of weird marketing crap, like marketing Chicago as the DLC Conversation rather than the Democratic Convention. It’s weird how their goal is to engineer a takeover of the party by near-threat rather than to attempt to win outright. The claim that this is to appeal to centrists, but mostly it just defies logic.

The biggest difference, which seems this time to have shot Clinton in the foot, is the 50 state strategy, which has democratic candidates trying to win in every state, rather than the DLC which aims to leverage victory by just winning a few small states outside of the democratic core.

Basically, to win the primary, Clinton is relying on people who will be voting for McCain in the general election. Because Clinton and McCain are relying on the same groups as their core woters — less educated, largely white counties, she’s got a bigger chance of being Kerry part II in the general election. Here’s a graphic from the New York Times that explains it: obama versus clinton.

Meanwhile, because Obama’s been competing in all 50 states, he’s got a lot more states that are far more securely locked down than Clinton, but that will be the subject of my next post. It appears that Clinton’s going to have to pull some sort of bullshit at the convention to win, and then is well-placed to lose the general election. joy.

The call is deceptive because the deadline has already passed for mail-in registrations for North Carolina’s May 6 primary. Also, many who have received the calls — like Kevin Farmer in Durham, who made a tape of the call that is available here — are already registered. The call’s suggestion that they’re not registered has caused widespread confusion and drawn hundreds of complaints, including many from African-American voters who received the calls.

The calls are also probably illegal. Farmer and others have told Facing South the calls use a blocked phone number and provided no contact information — a violation of North Carolina rules regulating “robo-calls” (N.C. General Statute 163-104(b)(1)c). N.C. Attorney General Roy Cooper further stated in a recent memo that the identifying information must be clear enough to allow the recipient to “complain or seek redress” — something not included in the calls.

It is also a Class I felony in North Carolina “to misrepresent the law to the public through mass mailing or any other means of communication where the intent and the effect is to intimidate or discourage potential voters from exercising their lawful right to vote.”

The calls have been denounced by the N.C. State Board of Elections, as well as by voter advocacy groups including Democracy North Carolina, which called them “another in a long line of deceptive practices used in North Carolina and elsewhere that particularly target African-American voters.

The article has a lot of interesting coverage of the details, and other articles covering similar topics can easily be found. I think that these actions, repeated in apparently 11 states so far, are pretty ham-handed, and since it’s apparently targeting African-Americans and done by her backers, it’s eventually going to cause a lot of trouble for Clinton irrespective of whether she wins or loses.