Not-So-Super Tuesday

New York—Let’s begin with a counterfactual. Did Super Tuesday even matter?

Sure, there were points of interest. Huckabee won handful of southern states, which moves his campaign out of the “finished” column and into “limping.” Barack Obama won his home state by more than Hillary Clinton won hers. Clinton did a little better than Obama in California, which splits its delegates anyway. But the headlines this morning could have been written before yesterday’s voting even began: McCain Moves Closer to Republican Nomination; Democrats Divided. In a season of surprises, yesterday’s primary bonanza had surprisingly few.

For all its hype — and the hype was overwhelming — Super Tuesday demonstrated nothing so much as the limits of horse-race coverage. Unless coloured bar charts and pie graphs rock your world, last night made for dull television. The networks were battling not only the sheer repetition of the evening (“Hang on to your hats, ladies and gentlemen! We’re about to give you an updated delegate count from ... Georgia!”). They were also up against the ghosts of primaries past, as Alessandra Stanley of the Times points out: bad predictions in previous elections have made producers reluctant to call a winner until the passing minutes drain the last beads of sweaty excitement from the verdict.

If Super Tuesday yielded little new insight as to who will become their parties’ nominees, it may have forced some to think a little harder about the costs of a protracted primary contest. The lead editorial in today’s Times is filled with worry over yesterday’s exit polls, which showed that Democrats voted significantly along race and gender lines, while Republican votes were determined to a large part by religion, by who heeds the words of James Dobson and who ignores them. “The primary season has created stark intramural divisions that pose risks for both Democrats and Republicans,” the paper warns, “and the real interparty race hasn’t even begun.” In a country where competitive nomination races are rare, the fall-out of that competition is becoming cause for alarm.

This will come as old news to Canadians, whose two main parties use leadership battles to tear each other apart, then linger over their wounds for a pathological amount of time. I think this may even seem normal to us. But in the US, the spectre of manufactured division is generating a refreshing concern. That creates the fascinating question of which pressure Clinton and Obama, and to a lesser extent McCain and the Dobsonites, will eventually succumb to — the internal pressure to exploit their differences for factional benefit, or the external pressure to avoid that degenerative process.

Maybe that will be the lasting significance of yesterday’s otherwise not-so-Super Tuesday: a prompt for both parties to ask whether getting their preferred nominee is really more valuable than getting a nominee who still has all of his or her limbs intact. Now that would be super. We could even try it in Canada.

Read more from Christopher Flavelle’s blog, Bright Lights, here.