The Clinton campaign is confident of a Pa. victory, but downplays talk of a double-digit win. Five things to watch in Pennsylvania

PITTSBURGH – When the Democratic presidential primary moved to Pennsylvania in early March, the central question was never whether Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton would win the state. Rather, it was by how much.

Six weeks later, the question remains the same.


Amidst a high stakes game of managing expectations, Sen. Barack Obama and his top advisers conceded Monday that they expected to lose. The Clinton campaign, meanwhile, remained confident but downplayed talk of a double-digit win.

With so much riding on the expected margin of victory, here’s a guide to what to look for as the primary results trickle in.

Check for turnout at 1 p.m. By this point Tuesday, the campaigns should have a good sense of what kind of outcome to expect. They will look first to Philadelphia, where a crush of voters early in the day will bode well for Obama and badly for Clinton since it will signal that he could win the big margin he needs to take out of the city.

Plus, African Americans tend to go to the polls later in the day in Philadelphia, according to a city-based Democratic strategist, which means Obama can expect a late surge from voters who support him in disproportionately high numbers.

Don’t be fooled by early results. The cities and suburbs usually report their returns first, which gives the candidate favored in those areas a quick – and sometimes fleeting – lead. The conservative-leaning small towns through the center of the state usually filter in much later in the evening.

This tendency has wreaked havoc in past elections: A Democrat goes to bed thinking he or she is the winner, but wakes up the loser. The last time it happened was 2004, when the Associated Press called the state attorney general race for Democrat James Eisenhower and retracted it later in the night as the numbers closed. Some newspapers went to print with the wrong results.

So Obama could show a lead in the early results, but it might be short-lived. If Clinton is ahead at the start, she may never lose it.

Follow the undecideds. For weeks, the campaigns have been trying to convince a stubborn group of undecided voters – an average of nine percent in polls released Monday – to make up their minds.

Voters who decide late usually go with the candidate who represents something new, potentially giving the edge to Obama. But in this Democratic primary season, voters who have decided in the last three days have more often broken in Clinton’s favor.

Obama and Clinton each invested significant time in recent days in Central Pennsylvania, where polls have found a slightly larger pool of undecided voters than other regions.

Watch these towns and neighborhoods. While the campaigns are reluctant to disclose the places they will be looking at, here are some key precincts, wards and towns that unaffiliated Pennsylvania political strategists say they will be monitoring.

Obama should be aiming for at least 55 percent turnout in African American wards in Philadelphia, 60 percent in the upscale white neighborhoods of Center City Philadelphia, and 70 percent in Lower Merion, the wealthy Philadelphia suburb with large numbers of highly educated and increasingly liberal voters.

The best indicator of the level of Obama support among younger voters—a group pollsters worry may not have been captured in recent surveys—will be turnout in places like State College, home to Penn State University’s main campus, or the precincts around smaller schools like Muhlenberg College in Allentown.

Clinton needs strong turnout in Northeast Philadelphia, a string of largely white, blue collar neighborhoods, and in working-class Philadelphia suburbs such as Bensalem and Bristol.

Key counties to keep an eye on. Political analysts point to the 2002 Democratic gubernatorial primary between Ed Rendell and Bob Casey Jr. as the closest comparison to the match up between Obama and Clinton.

Rendell won that closely contested race with a coalition of African Americans and upscale, highly educated white voters—a coalition like the one assembled by Obama. Casey focused on blue collar workers, union households, lower-income individuals and ethnic white voters—strikingly similar to Clinton’s base in Pennsylvania.

Rendell beat Casey by winning only 10 counties out of 67 in the state. The governor won Philadelphia by 160,000 votes, and swept the four suburban counties—Bucks, Chester, Delaware and Montgomery—with 80-90 percent of the vote. He carried the Lehigh Valley, which includes Allentown, Bethlehem and Easton, by a 2-to-1 margin. He edged out Casey in Penn State’s Centre County by five points.

Casey won the other major population centers in Southwest and Central Pennsylvania, but not by enough to offset Rendell’s advantage in the populous Southeast.

To duplicate Rendell’s victory, Obama would need to show a similar level of strength as Rendell in the Philadelphia region and in the Lehigh Valley. But no polls have found him getting anywhere close.

Obama remains in a dead heat with Clinton in the Lehigh Valley, said Christopher Borick, a pollster at Muhlenberg College, but he needs closer to 55 percent of the vote.

While a Quinnipiac University survey released Monday found him leading by 13 points in Philadelphia, four points in the Southeast and six points in Central Pennsylvania, that’s still not going to be enough to carry him statewide. An overwhelming turnout, however, would boost his numbers, analysts said.

Across the state, in Pittsburgh’s Allegheny County, Obama will need to stay within about five percentage points of Clinton to sustain his chances for a win.

In order for Clinton to win a decisive victory of 10 points or more, she needs to win two-thirds of the votes in a group of eight industrial-oriented counties, each of which has 55,000 or more registered Democrats. Those counties are Lackawanna (Scranton) and Luzerne (Wilkes-Barre) in the Northeast, Erie in the Northwest, Cambria County (Johnstown), and the Pittsburgh-area counties of Westmoreland, Fayette, Beaver, and Washington.

In south central Pennsylvania, which got lots of attention from both candidates, Lancaster and Adams counties will provide a glimpse into Obama’s popularity with newly-registered Democrats. Though these areas have traditionally elected Republicans, they’ve experienced significant growth as affluent residents have moved in from Baltimore, D.C. and southeastern Pennsylvania.