At this point, it is safe to say that the election will be Barack Obama v. John McCain. Hillary is left on life support at this point. If she loses either Ohio or Texas, she is probably toast. I have no doubt that she will fight on, but at a certain point she becomes like Mike Huckabee is to McCain, still in the race, but largely ignored by the media, donors, and voters.

If she wins Ohio and Texas, even by narrow margins, she still has a shot. That will blunt some of his momentum, and if she can keep it within a hundred pledged delegates or so, she can effectively make the argument to the superdelegates that the party should not nominate the person who lost CA, TX, NY, FL, OH, PA, and MI, seven of the ten largest states. She can show the superdelegates the dossier she has collected on Obama of arguments that she can’t really make (but that Republicans can) furthering her “fully vetted” argument. She can make a plausible argument for seating the Florida delegation (much more plausible than her argument for seating the MI delegation)** and can point out that the whole purpose of Superdelegates is to step in when the party is split like this, and make a decision. I’m not saying that she wins this argument, I’m just saying it is do-able.

That said, I don’t think she’ll win Texas, and maybe not Ohio. Something changed last night. Looking at the Democratic exit polls, and plugging back into my earlier regression analysis, she should have won Wisconsin by about 8 points. Obviously something different occurred. The mere inclusion of WI in my dataset knocks the r-square from somewhere in the 90s to somewhere in the 70s, and while all of the data other than 100K+ remain statistically significant, we can finally start to see some type of time series emerging from the residuals.

The exit poll data bear this out. For the first time, Obama seems to be eating into her base of women and working class white voters. Moreover, late deciders broke against her relative to when others decided, and Obama overperformed polls in a non-Southern state. This hasn’t happened recently. The polls are narrowing in Ohio and Texas, and nothing last night is going to stop this. I think she probably loses both at this point, effectively ending her bid.

The best thing she has going for her is that there are two weeks between now and TX/OH, which gives people a chance to breathe and think about something besides the fact that Barack is winning primaries. She will, of course, try to use that time to pop the Obama bubble. If she survives those primaries, she has over a month to try to tear Obama down. And she might be able to do it, but I sure wouldn’t bet on it.

The interesting thing is that this could be the best thing that happens to Democrats. Her argument that Obama has not been fully vetted might be one that Democratic primary voters don’t care about, but it is absolutely true. No one goes through life without accumulating baggage and skeletons, and that is doubly true in politics. Obama will be vetted sooner rather than later, and quite frankly it will be better for Democrats if that stuff comes out in a primary, rather than, say, the weekend before the election (eg Bush’s drunk driving arrest). Someone is going to try to kill Bambi, and it is better that it be one of their own (and I mean this in the sense that Richard Ben Cramer used it in “What It Takes” to describe Gephardt’s self-immolating takedown of Paul Simon in 1988, not in the conspiracy theory wackiness that Obama will be inevitably assassinated).

Which brings us to the general election. Now all this comes with the general disclaimer that the climate is, generally speaking, not great for Republicans. It has certainly improved since early 2007, at which point Democrats probably could have won with Dennis Kucinich as their nominee, but it is still not good. In other words, it might not matter who the Republicans or Democrats nominate.

That said, all other things being equal, I have long thought that I would rather face Obama in a general election than Hillary. This has changed somewhat, but only because of what Hillary would have to do to win the nomination: win at a convention, and face charges of stealing the nomination.

This is an important consideration. But the thing is, I don’t see AAs or champagne socialists lining up to vote for McCain under any circumstances. Some might stay home, but ultimately McCain has little chance with disaffected Obama voters in November.

More importantly, Hillary is right, she is what she is, and it is all pretty much out there. She’s at rock bottom in general election polling right now. But part of this is that she is losing voters in polls who realistically will vote for her come November, and because she’s perceived as a loser right now. Put together some primary victories, win the nomination, get a lively convention endorsement from Obama (who will want to avoid looking like a sore loser for 2012 or 2016) and I suspect her numbers will perk back up.

And even more importantly: She is willing to do What it Takes — indeed Whatever it Takes — to win. Any doubts about this should be settled by her apparent desire to win over Obama pledged delegates. She would not be averse to throwing a hard punch at McCain. I’m still not convinced about Obama’s willingness to do this, given that he has been aided by the implosion of his opponents in every race he’s run. This includes this one incidentally; people forget that Hillary’s fall in the polls can be directly dated from about October 31, 2007, when she gave an abysmal non-answer to whether or not to give driver’s licenses to illegal immigrants.

As for Obama, he is at the height of a bubble, imho. The man consistently flew under the radar screen until January, when he shot up in the polls. He literally hasn’t had a bad press cycle since August, when he made a series of statements that won’t fly in the general (cross the border into Pakistan, sit down with Chavez et al in his first year, comparing the “violence” of losing jobs to the Va Tech shootings). Even so, McCain polls well against him. Obama right now isn’t just a candidate, he’s a phenomenon.

But phenomenons (phenomena?) rarely last. While Obama pledges to work from and with the center, there is very little in his voting record to indicate that’s where he will end up. People will inevitably tire of his stump speech, the same way that “Macarena” was a fun dance song the first million times or so that I heard it, before it started to piss me off. You can start to feel this in the punditocracy and in news analysis — what exactly DOES it mean to talk about the “audacity of hope” or to say that “you are the change that we’ve been waiting for”? When Leno and SNL start making fun of Obama’s lofty rhetoric, what exactly will Obama be left with (this isn’t to say “nothing,” but it is to say I really don’t know).

In the end, to win the nomination, a Democrat basically needs to win Ohio. And to win Ohio, that Democrat needs to do well in Southeastern Ohio, which is basically a mini-Appalachia. And the question becomes whether, in a general election, against a white male war hero (instead of a woman) those good ol’ boys are going to vote for a black guy named Barack Hussein Obama with pretty words who wanted to ban handguns in Illinois and voted so that doctors didn’t have to take care of babies who were born but who survived an abortion attempt (this isn’t to say that’s a completely fair characterization, but that is what the characterization will be). I’m not 100% sure, but I think the answer is “no,” and I think we’ve been seeing this in the Democratic primary results so far, without the actual policy issues thrown in the mix.

To go back to coalitions, I’m convinced most of Baracks’ coalition will get behind Hillary. The problem is that Hillary’s base among Hispanics and white ethnics (who can increasingly be treated as a single group, which is why America will never be minority-majority, but that’s a subject for a different post) are classic Dem-leaning swing voters. Obama is at a much greater risk of losing them than Hillary is of losing AAs and wealthy liberals.

This isn’t to say that McCain is without his own problems. The “100 years” comment on Iraq was boneheaded, and he is benefitting from some of the same events propelling Obama — the meltdown of his opponents and flying under the radar for the better portion of the late stages of the campaign. There will be a swiftvet campaign against him — I personally know one general who was in Hanoi with him who hates him for taping the forced confession. I’m guessing there are more. If I had to bet, I would still bet on a Democrat winning in 2008, regardless of the candidate. But again, I think Hillary has a much better chance of being willing to exploit these weaknesses, and tear JMac apart.

But regardless, you can already see the parties’ themes shaping up for the fall. McCain will try to paint Obama as George McGovern without the experience and with a better stump speech. Obama will try to paint McCain as Bush’s third term. I think the former argument is easier to make than the latter, and on a level playing field, I’d expect McCain to win. But again, this isn’t a level playing field.

In the end, my general election analysis has remained unchanged over the past year. I think there is a substantial voting bloc that will support Hillary, and a substantial bloc that will vote against her no matter what. Unlike Obama, she is steely disciplined, and is rarely off-message. I think that her range is somewhere from 47-53% of the popular vote, with a midpoint of around 52%. For Obama, it is a different story. He could very well have a month like he did in August of last year, and it could have a horrific effect on his polling numbers. He may prove incapable of throwing a punch. And he may have a glass jaw when really walloped. On the other hand, people could continue to be wowed by him. McCain could fall off of a stage, a la Bob Dole, or have a health problem. And Obama will never engender the animosity that Hillary does. In other words, Obama’s range is somewhere between 43% and 57% of the vote, though I’d place his midpoint more around 51-52% of the vote.

It will be an interesting November.

*Hat tip, as always, to Indy Voter for the “comeback coot” moniker.

**The interesting thing is this: Had Michigan and Florida not moved their primaries up, they would have counted, and there would have been additional firewalls for Hillary to bank on early in the process — Florida would likely have occurred no later than March, and MI would be likely giving her delegates sometime in February. In other words, by moving their primaries up, FL and MI really damaged Clinton’s candidacy, not only by depriving her of delegates but by putting asterisks by what could have been seriously momentum-changers.