Occasional TAC contributor Glenn Greenwald has been working with the ACLU’s blog to develop an online symposium on torture for this week, and it begins today.  I was invited to be one of the symposiasts, and my first contribution should be up sometime today.  More links and updates as I am able to put them up.

Update: Here is my post.  Here are the contributions from Joan McCarter and Glenn Greenwald.

Obama has picked up a net 145 delegate advantage in caucuses and a net delegate advantage of exactly seven delegates in primaries. Seven. And as the article also notes and as I noted above, Obama did much better in caucuses than in nonbinding primaries in the two states that held both, Washington and Nebraska. Obama and many, possibly most, superdelegates believe that he has a moral claim on superdelegate votes by virtue of his lead in pledged delegates. But that lead comes almost entirely from caucuses, which have many fewer participants and are presumably less accurately representative of the mass of Democratic voters than primaries. ~Michael Barone

So could the June 3 primaries in South Dakota and Montana, which Obama is expected to win, but not by wide popular-vote margins.  ~Michael Barone

I keep seeing people treat South Dakota and Montana as if they were obviously good states for Obama, but I’ve never been clear on why.  As far as I can tell, no one has bothered to do any polling in either state, so we have no measurement of either candidate’s support.  If it’s true that “demography is destiny” and neither campaign has much luck with the other’s constituencies, what is it about the demography of South Dakota and Montana that makes these states likely to give wins to Obama?  Both states are holding primaries, not caucuses, which suggests that the results are going to look very different from the caucus tallies from neighbouring states.  Obama has tended to do well in overwhelmingly white states where they have caucuses, but not so often in primaries.  Wisconsin remains an exception that gets stranger by the day. 

Correction: There is at least one poll from about a month ago that gives Obama an advantage in South Dakota.  There seems to be no evidence for Montana one way or the other.

Our view is that if the Republican Party of 2008 would prefer to lose with Mr. Pearce than win with Ms. Wilson, it deserves its fate. ~The New York Sun

In light of polling showing both Pearce and Wilson losing to Udall by 25 points, this is not the reason to pick one or the other.  Certainly, I share the conventional view that Wilson would probably be more competitive statewide.  Instead of losing by 25, she might knock it down to 15 before it’s all over, but it’s ludicrous at this point to talk about a Republican victory in that Senate race.  The national mood is running against their party, and the state’s demographic make-up is not naturally friendly to Republican candidates.  It is interesting that Pearce is slightly ahead of Wilson in the weeks leading up to the primary vote.  It isn’t surprising to me that once Wilson had to appeal to Republicans outside the First District that she would have a harder time, but I have expected her legendary campaigning ability to overcome Pearce’s lower-profile challenge.  It was significant that Domenici, long her mentor and patron, refused to pick sides in the primary, perhaps trying to undo some of the damage he did when he originally foisted her on the district ten years ago.  She may yet get the nomination, but it’s not much of a prize.

Yglesias:

Dana Goldstein explains why Barack Obama won’t be able to just “declare victory” after tomorrow’s primaries.  I think she’s right — by the math and on the merits, he’s entitled to do so, but the backlash against an explicit effort to force Clinton out before she’s prepared to concede would be too big.

The backlash would be particularly great if he didn’t win either of the primaries and then declared the race over.  Clinton’s lead in Kentucky is so gaudy and embarrassingly large that his supporters have been reduced to talking about Oregon “cancelling” out a Kentucky loss, even though they are comparably important states in delegate count (52 vs. 51) and she stands to win by 25+ points while he might win by ten if he’s having a good night.  It’s very, very unlikely that he would lose both, but if the margins are anything like the four or five-point margins that we have been seeing in the most recentpolls his Oregon victory will not appear to be that much of a victory.  It will definitely put his Portland mega-crowd into perspective, and in the very unlikely event of an Obama loss in Oregon the gigantic size of his Portland crowd will be rather grimly contrasted with his limited support throughout the rest of the state. 

Update: Okay, SUSA gives Obama a sizeable lead in Oregon, and his support outside of Portland is quite strong.

Second Update: Kaus notes late pro-Clinton movement.

The idea that antiwar voters who support Barr might have backed Obama seems plausible at first glance, until you actually pay attention to who Barr’s likely voters are.  They are, so far as I can tell, independent conservatives and libertarians who supported Paul, plus the regular Libertarians, who find McCain unacceptable on a wide range of issues that also prevents them from supporting Obama.  You can include me in that group.  Such is the strange nature of this election that this fairly consistent position strikes the Obama-supporting conservatives and libertarians as inexplicable and grounds for harsh criticism. 

It’s true that Paul voters were never going to go for McCain, and many of them seem to be supporting Obama, but they continue to support Obama even now despite the emergence of Barr’s candidacy.  (Strange exit poll fact of the day: McCain voters in the primaries were more likely to view Ron Paul favourably than the supporters of any other candidate besides, of course, Paul.)  Those who have chosen to go for Barr anyway, despite the existence of a “credible” major party antiwar candidacy, are as irreconcilably against Obama as they are against McCain, albeit perhaps for some different reasons.  The Paul voters who have turned to Obama do this on the assumption that they will achieve the same antiwar goals that Barr espouses but will never be able to implement (“barring” a rather unusual change in voting patterns).  These tend to be the Paul supporters who are also not interested in the other things that Barr emphasises, particularly with regard to immigration, and who were probably less likely to find McCain’s views on immigration very troubling.  Thus it doesn’t bother them that Obama is to the left of Clinton and McCain on immigration.

Obama’s biggest potential problem among his Republican supporters remains moderate Republicans, who are exactly the sort of “soft” or independent Republicans whom Obama should be able to peel away under normal circumstances, but whom McCain appeals to for reasons that continue to escape me.  Single-issue antiwar voters who back Obama will not be pulled away by Barr for two reasons: Barr is not running a purely antiwar campaign, but a comprehensive small government, conservative-libertarian campaign, and they believe that Obama can actually end the war, which is their top priority (that’s why they are single-issue voters).  As I have said before, though, this microscopic analysis of Obama’s Republican and right-wing supporters will probably matter very little to the final outcome, because McCain continues to pull away more Democrats from Obama than he loses among Republicans.

“Governor,” the film critic asks, “is there a favorite political movie of yours that you think gets at the intersection of things political and things artistic?”

Romney stalls, beaming a smile out from under a fresh coffee-brown tan. “Certain movies have had an influence. … The Manchurian Candidate …” ~Eve Fairbanks

Fairbanks’ earlier comparison to Pu Yi now makes more sense, since Romney volunteered the Manchurian connection himself.  But did Romney really mention The Manchurian Candidate while campaigning for McCain?  At least he didn’t mention Dr. Strangelove! 

In any case, Romney should know a thing or two about the intersection of film and politics, since he was pretty clearly reading from a script at all times.

A similar pattern has emerged in a handful of Rust Belt and border states. With the exception of 1972 and 1984, West Virginia also voted for the Democratic presidential nominee from 1932 to 1996, and it hasn’t elected a GOP senator for generations. Missouri, Kentucky, Arkansas and Ohio all went for Jimmy Carter in 1976 and for Bill Clinton twice. All but Ohio have been dominated by Democrats at the congressional and gubernatorial levels for decades. But all five went for George W. Bush in 2000 and 2004.

The reason: Casey Democrats. “Democrats’ difficulties with this group surely have a great deal to do with these voters’ sense of cultural alienation from the national Democratic Party and its relatively cosmopolitan values around religion, family, guns and other social institutions/practices,” blogged Democratic strategist Ruy Teixeira after the 2004 election. Just two years earlier, in their book, “The Emerging Democratic Majority,” Teixeira and John Judis had predicted that the party’s economic liberalism would bear the Democratic nominee to victory in such states. ~Mark Stricherz

For obvious reasons, I was very interested to read this article, since it ties together several of the states I have been discussing in recent weeks where there seems to be particularly strong resistance to Obama, and where there also seems to be significantly less resistance to Clinton.  When a Democratic candidate wins these states, as they should by all rights given the strong Democratic local and state presence in all of them, he wins the White House.  Without them, he fails. 

Put simply, if all of the states (minus Pennsylvania) mentioned in this article go against Obama and Colorado and Virginia continue in their general post-1968 pattern of voting for the Republican, it would be extremely difficult for him to win the election.  If Pennsylvania were lost it would be nearly impossible.  If the GOP took all these “Casey Democrat” states, not including Pennsylvania, and also won New Mexico (while holding Colorado), the Democrats would still lose even if they won in Virginia.  Likewise, Colorado alone wouldn’t be enough.  Dem wins in Colorado and New Mexico wouldn’t be enough for an outright win, either, though in that latter scenario would result in a 269-269 tie and throw it to the House, resulting in a Dem win.  Bottom line: based on how these “Casey Democrat” states are leaning right now, some combination of two of those three states have to turn “blue” for Obama if he is going to win.  Of course, if you include Pennsylvania in the Republican column, Democrats could carry Colorado, New Mexico and Virginia and it still wouldn’t matter.  For Obama to win, it seems likely that at least one of these three states will have to vote in a way that it hasn’t voted in either 44 years (VA) or 16 years (CO), and possibly two of the three will have to do this.  For McCain to win, he needs Virginia and Colorado to vote as they have done for four decades, and then it doesn’t matter what happens in New Mexico.  If McCain continues to lead in places such as Wisconsin and Michigan, all of this won’t matter anyway, but the Democrats have chosen a good spot for their convention, since Colorado is going to become a more crucial and more hotly contested swing state than most.

Kentucky anxious, seen leaning Clinton’s way ~Chicago Tribune

Clinton leads 62% to 30% today [5/12], effectively unchanged from SurveyUSA polls released 4 weeks, 2 weeks and 1 week ago.

That’s quite a lean.  If it leaned much more, it would fall over into West Virginia.

P.S.  SurveyUSA had a nice phrase for what will happen on Tuesday: “ceremonial trouncing.”