OK, About That Election...

As for election news in California, the final two polls have been wildly divergent. SurveyUSA shows a 10-point Clinton lead, while Reuters/Zogby has a 13-point Obama lead. The final Field Poll (the gold standard, as everyone knows) went with a one-point lead to Obama, almost exactly in the middle.

Of course, this only tells part of the story, as Marc Ambinder picked up on my caveat that the district-level delegate system will skew the results, particularly in those even-numbered districts, where a high bar is needed to be scaled to get anything beyond an even split of delegates. And if you expect an early answer about them, think again:

So much for having a hard delegate count on Super Tuesday, we're hearing that CA Dems won't have final delegate tally ready until Friday.

Debra Bowen's mantra has been that she'd rather get the count right than get it fast, so everyone's going to have to wait. I think it's a small price to pay for voting with a paper ballot. By the way, DTS voters, fill that bubble!

The Cook Political Report did the same district-level analysis that I did yesterday, and found a considerably larger amount of variance. Cook thinks that Clinton can get over the 63% bar in those heavily-Latino districts (I'm not so sure). I understand that the 6-delegate seats require 58.3% of the vote to get a 4-2 split, which seems to me to be possible in Barbara Lee's CA-09 and Nancy Pelosi's CA-08, so Obama could be in an even stronger position than I thought. And as Councilman Garcetti said last night, they are paying attention to this stuff, on both sides I would imagine.

Finally, we have somewhat neglected the Republican race. The chic pick is that Romney has come all the way back and will take California. John McCain is apparently worried about it, since it would mean that Romney has an argument to stay in the race. Both candidates scurried back here today for extra bits of campaigning.

And yet McCain's people fear he may lose the popular vote in California to Romney -- even if they haul in the same number of CA delegates -- and that the Super Tuesday story will therefore NOT be the crowning of McCain but rather his failure to put away the game, a failure born of his fractious and sometimes unloving relationship with conservatives, especially those millions of conservatives who listen to and abide by Rush Limbaugh and Sean Hannity, not to mention Limbaugh and Hannity themselves, and a failure that in turn will be viewed as both a symptom and a cause of the historic crack-up of the conservative coalition that has sustained and nourished the Republican Party for a couple generations.

Which would be fantastic, since it would be desirable for their race to be as screwed up as ours. Could the relentless Rush Limbaugh attacks be having an impact? We'll soon find out.

UPDATE: Harold Meyerson has further thoughts, and they're good.