Obamomentum, West Virginia Edition

It’s not every day you see the presumptive nominee lose a presidential primary in a swing state by 41 points (by contrast, despite a persistent protest vote faction, McCain hasn’t actually lost a primary since Kansas and Louisiana on February 9), but that’s exactly what happened to Barack Obama last night in West Virginia, and suggests pretty strongly why his campaign seems to be writing off the state for November.
Anyway, let’s update the chart I’ve been running (last installment here) showing the popular vote trend since Obama’s armor started to crack at the beginning of March. Here’s the current chart:

Attentive readers will note that some of the earlier states’ vote totals have changed slightly; I’m using the RCP figures, which presumably got some late corrections on TX, PA, IN and NC. RCP also has the overall numbers, which mostly narrowly favor Obama, though it depends on what states you count; in any event, recall that Obama didn’t even crack 30% in national polls against Hillary until after he won Iowa, and didn’t catch her until early February, after trailing by double digits for most of 2007; much of the Obama vote in the first two months was basically the honeymoon of a challenger who had yet to be seriously vetted. So while looking at the last two and a half months doesn’t cover the whole race, it likely tells us a lot more than looking at things that happened a political lifetime ago. If you knew nothing else of this race, you’d certainly look at those trendlines and think, especially after last night, that Hillary was really pulling away by now.
Where from here? Another interesting thing is that my rough-estimate projection last week vastly underestimated Hillary’s West Virginia margin of victory, which was twice what my mostly unscientific model had projected. Partly that’s because I was working off one poll with a lot of undecideds, but partly it’s because turnout was larger than the baseline I was using, the number of votes for House Democrats in the off-year 2006 election, which I took as a reasonable proxy for the number of people available to vote in a Democratic primary. I’ll attach at the bottom of this post a chart showing how that figure has served as a predictor of turnout, but the take-home from that exercise is that West Virginia Democrats came out in very large numbers despite their betters in the media telling them the race was over, already, man – not quite as large numbers as we saw in Indiana, North Carolina, Mississippi and Texas, but larger proportional turnout by this metric than in Pennsylvania, Ohio, Wisconsin, or Virginia. The voters apparently think there’s still something to vote on.
If we update last week’s projections, then, with more recent polling and an assumption of 125% rather than 100% turnout relative to the 2006 figures, what do we get? I’m using now the RCP averages for Oregon and Kentucky, but I don’t have new polls for Puerto Rico, South Dakota or Montana, and I’m still using the conservative 60% estimate for Puerto Rico:

In other words, if form holds – even using the conservative projection of the vote total in Puerto Rico – Obama could end up well over half a million votes under water for the last three months of the primaries. We can only speculate as to why Obama has been struggling like this – whether it’s a sign of Hillary’s strength, the nature of the later primary states, a temporary weakness or permanent damage to Obama – and whether it will carry over in the general election campaign. But I can say this: if Obama was a fatally damaged general election candidate by this point, this is pretty much how you would expect him to be doing in the late primaries.

Here’s the turnout chart, which is interesting in its own right:

The primary vote total is just Obama’s and Clinton’s votes, so it may underreport turnout in a few of the early races when some people were still casting votes for Edwards (in Michigan, where Obama didn’t bother getting on the ballot, I just added Hillary plus the “uncommitted” vote). The states marked “NA” are caucus states that have not released vote totals; the states with turnout below 20% are mostly caucuses as well, most of which Obama won. We can only speculate whether primaries in those states would have produced (1) more votes for Obama or (2) a different outcome. At any rate, you can see that turnout by this metric had largely hovered around 100% until the more recent primaries that saw a surge of interest – another reason why the March-April-May results should be more worrisome to Obama backers, as despite his claims at bringing in new voters, he actually tends to do worse the larger the turnout.