Reality Check

Obama held what sounds like a great rally in Scranton Sunday night. Some 4800 enthusiastic people saw not only Obama and Caroline Kennedy, and the ever-present Bob Casey, Jr., but several other Caseys--all from Scranton--including Senator Casey's mother, Eleanor, wife of the former Governor Bob Casey. (I met Eleanor once--charming, intelligent woman.) The three paragraph summary in this Time story is a pretty good excerpt, and tells you that Obama is really on his game now, despite the widely reported throwaway line about even McCain being better than Bush.

The Obama campaign has worked hard for votes in Scranton, according to this article in the Washington Post, even though they've had to deal with racial slurs and threats. And even though they would consider losing by anything under 30 points there a victory. (I've posted a bunch of photos from the PA weekend campaign at Captain Future's Dreaming Up Daily.)

Final election forecasts will be everywhere Monday, and will influence the spin as the actual results come in on Tuesday night. I'll save my predictions of what that spin will be like until I summarize the predictions. But at the close of Sunday, some reality checks emerged that ought to be part of how the PA vote is evaluated.

There has been plenty written about how it will become nearly impossible for Clinton to pull even with Obama in delegates gained as the result of contests, without a blowout win in Pennsylvania that leads to one blowout win after another through to the last in June. But Bloomberg evaluated her chances of catching Obama in the popular vote, which some in her campaign have held out as her last hope. And their story on this is devastating:

"Even if the New York senator wins by more than 20 percentage points tomorrow -- a landslide few experts expect -- she would still have a hard time catching him."

The story goes into excruciating detail of what that means: Clinton would need a 25-point victory in Pennsylvania, plus 20-point wins in later contests in West Virginia, Kentucky and Puerto Rico. Even that scenario assumes Clinton, 60, would break even in Indiana, North Carolina, South Dakota, Montana and Oregon -- a prospect that's not at all certain.

More than just big margins, Clinton would need record voter turnout too. In Pennsylvania, she would need a turnout of 2 million, about half the state's registered Democrats; in the 2004 primary, about 800,000 voted. She would also need turnout to almost double in other states where she leads, and reach some 1 million in Puerto Rico, which is about how many Democratic- leaning voters went to the polls in a 2004 gubernatorial election.

That's more than a mountain to climb--that's walking to the moon. And maybe without shoes--because the one bit of news Sunday night was the fundraising numbers the campaigns had to file by midnight. According to official numbers, Obama started April with $42.5 million cash for the primaries (and another 9.5 for the general.) Although the filing deadline came and went without an official announcement from the Clinton camp, a spokesperson there said the Clinton campaign started April with about $8 million it could spend on primaries.

So what are the pundits going to say Monday and Tuesday? That she needs a 10 point victory, or any victory to stay in? Or are they going to say that realistically she needs a 25 point victory in PA?