America's campaigns have not turned out as expected

By Michael Barone

On New Year's Eve, just 70 days ago, the course of the 2008 presidential campaign seemed reasonably clear. Hillary Clinton would win the Democratic nomination. The Republicans, fractured between cultural, economic and national security conservatives, seemed headed for a long and divisive contest. Now it has turned out the other way round. As for the general election, polls showed voters preferred a Democratic to a Republican president by margins not seen since the 1970s. Now current polls show a roughly even race between John McCain, certified as the Republican nominee in the Rose Garden, and either Mr Obama or Mrs Clinton. How did this come to pass?

Luck and party rules that tend to allocate delegates on a winner-takes-all basis gave Mr McCain the nomination. Luck: Mike Huckabee edged Mitt Romney aside in Iowa, Rudy Giuliani retreated from New Hampshire en-abling Mr McCain to win there, Fred Thompson barnstormed in South Carolina enabling Mr McCain to outpoll Mr Huckabee by 3 per cent, Mr Giuliani collapsed in Florida where Cuban-Americans cascaded to Mr McCain. On Super Tuesday, February 5, winner-takes-all rules enabled Mr McCain to monopolise delegates in the north-east, in Missouri (with a 1 per cent margin over Mr Huckabee) and in 50 of California's 53 congressional districts. After the rivals all withdrew gracefully, the Republicans had a nominee and one with appeal for some voters who voted Democrat in 2000 and 2004.

Historically, the Democratic party has been an amalgam of minority groups, many with little affection for the others. So Democrats tend to allocate delegates by proportional representation. Today Mr Obama has about a 100-delegate lead over Mrs Clinton, thanks largely to caucuses in which his zealous supporters swamped the more lukewarm Clinton supporters. Mrs Clinton is carrying the old, women, the less-educated and Latinos; Mr Obama is carrying the young, men, the well-educated and blacks. Mrs Clinton won Ohio and Texas last week and seems well ahead in elderly, blue-collar Pennsylvania, which votes on April 22. But even if she sweeps the contests to come, proportional representation will leave her behind in delegates.

That means the superdelegates - some 795 elected officials and party leaders - will have to choose between rejecting the first African-American or woman with a chance to be president and in doing so alienating either Mr Obama's black and young enthusiasts or Mrs Clinton's older women.

All this could mean trouble in the general election. Current polling shows increasing numbers of Obama and Clinton supporters unwilling to back the other candidate. Most analysts had assumed that, in November, voters would divide along the familiarred state/blue state lines: 47 of the 50 states voted for the same party in 2000 and 2004. It is time to throw that old map out. SurveyUSA has just conducted polls in all 50 states pitting Mr McCain against both Democrats. In one or the other of those pairings, 17 states voted for a different party than in 2004. This election will be conducted on a larger battlefield than the past two contests.

The differences on issues will be stark. But the candidates are overstating the difference they are likely to make. The Democrats are making promises to the anti-war left on Iraq and to the unions on trade that they will be unable to keep. Mr McCain's economic policies seem sure to be rejected by a Congress that almost certainly, because of Republican retirements in the House and Democrats' advantages in the Senate seats up this year, will be more Democratic in 2009.

Democrats still have huge advantages. Their candidates have raised more than twice as much money as the Republicans. And until Super Tuesday, turnout was more than 50 per cent higher in Democratic than Republican contests; they were about equal in previous cycles.

But the course of the primaries has given Republicans about as strong a position in the election as they could hope for and the Democrats' efforts at producing a perfect delegate selection process have produced a perfect storm. Mr McCain has a chance to polish up the Republican brand from the tarnishing it has suffered under George W. Bush, while Mr Obama and Mrs Clinton have an incentive to lob charges against each other that will hurt the winner - and the Democratic brand - in the general election. Not what we expected when this thing started.

The writer is a senior writer for US News & World Report and is a resident fellow at the American Enterprise Institute