The Day After - California Analysis

I did a lot of district-by-district analysis over at my second home of Calitics. Obama actually had an excellent overnight. He kept contact in several districts, won enough in CA-09 for a 4-2 split, and I don't think CA-50 and CA-53 are worth calling yet until we see where the final votes are coming from; he's basically in the same position he was in CA-01. My approximations on delegates show that Clinton will win between 31 and 37 more delegates out of California. At one point last night it looked like 50-60.

My initial analysis wasn't all that off except for one key area: Clinton was able to get 3-1 splits in 8 key districts, almost all of them heavily Latino: CA-18, CA-21, CA-31 (hey, great job, Obama surrogate Xavier Becerra!), CA-32, CA-34, CA-38, CA-39 (awesome, Obama surrogate Linda Sanchez!), and CA-43. If Obama got enough votes in those districts to keep it close, and I mean a scant 35%, he would have basically been even or down by 5-7 delegates.

Those are districts that are dominated by Spanish-language media, that are in Los Angeles and Riverside and San Bernardino and Orange counties. They would be uniquely difficult to organize at the precinct level, and Clinton won based on paid media and name ID and connection to the Clinton policies of the past. Clinton's huge Asian vote probably helped as well, at least in CA-39. I also overestimated the value of endorsers like Becerra and Linda Sanchez and Adam Schiff. Congressmen don't necessarily have a machine to get out votes.

I should also mention that Charlie Cook did very well.

Hillary Clinton was up by a whole lot in this race and she ended up winning by single digits (about 9.5%). Given her early voting lead, depending on how many voted by mail she may have won by as little as 5% on Election Day. But she took the districts where she had a natural advantage strongly.

On the Republican side, John McCain won around 49 districts, Mitt Romney 4. Unbelievable.

UPDATE: Frank Russo notes something very important:

Of the 6.3 million ballots counted for Presidential candidates, 63% or over 4 million were cast in the Democratic primary and only 32% or 2.3 million and counting were cast in the Republican primary. Democrats and decline to state a party voters who participated in the Democratic primary far outperformed normal voting patterns in California. Democrats hold a 10 point margin in voter registration over Republicans in this state and decline to state voters account for 19% of registrations. There is a 31% spread between the Democratic primary vote here and the Republican primary vote.
That's extremely impressive, and a good harbinger for November. Russo also says there are as many as a million absentee votes that have yet to be counted, so these numbers could still move, which means delegates could shift as well.