Don’t forget that in states like NY, NJ, CA, RI Ohio, Penn, Florida, NH, NV, AR, TN, OK, (Massachusetts local politicos) NM, AZ,…In most of these states she won..she had the support of the Governor, and/Senator, Congressmen and the state and local machines. In the general election presumably the DEM machines would be working for Obama..while he can focus on purple and red states…like VA, IA, MO, CO, etc..where he is polling well and competitive in the polls with McCain,..
As Kos showed Hillary loses to McCain in a lot of states where Obama beats him.

You can almost directly attribute her margin of victory to the added resources supplied by Governors…Strickland in Ohio even admitted as such in a Cleveland Plain Dealer article…
Same goes for Corzine, Spitzer,Rendell,etc..

‘The point is that winning a primary in a state is a prima facie reason for thinking that you will do better in that state than the candidate you beat in that primary.”

This is incorrect. There is no correlation between winning a primary and doing better in a general election. As receives more support from independents, he would be the stronger general election candidate even in states where Clinton won the Democratic primary.

“on indipendents and republicans: most primaries are open. so if clinton has beaten obama in an open primary, then quite obviously your objection doesn’t work”

Also incorrect. Clinton has done best among Democratic voters, often in closed primaries. Even if the primary is open there is still a different population who turn out to vote in a Democratic Party than in the general election.

“finally, the primary result was one of two arguments for clinton electability. the other being the polls in the four states mentioned”

The analysis of the polls referred to also gives the advantage to Obama with regards to electability in the general election.

The bottom line is that Clinton would be a very weak general election candidate so the campaign is trying to offset this by putting out a bunch of bogus talking points.

your comments are a bit too general to respond to, but I’ll try.

Obviously the point isn’t that winning a primary makes you, ipso facto, favourite to win the state. The point is that winning a primary in a state is a prima facie reason for thinking that you will do better in that state than the candidate you beat in that primary.

on indipendents and republicans: most primaries are open. so if clinton has beaten obama in an open primary, then quite obviously your objection doesn’t work

finally, the primary result was one of two arguments for clinton electability. the other being the polls in the four states mentioned

With the Clinton supporters I think we are primarily seeing a group of women who now place having a female president over everything else. They don’t care that she is ethically unfit to be president, that she has minimal qualifications other than proximity to her husbands power, and that she has been wrong on so many issues. This won’t explain all of them, but it gives them a fanatic core of supporters which make them a factor. A male with Clinton’s lack of qualifications accompanied by history of such poor judgment and dishonesty would not have such a band of followers.

In fact, what I’m hearing this morning is, some of Hillary’s lynch mob are talking boycotts and even demanding MSNBC fired Keith for daring to speak the truth about their Queen.

It’s getting insane, folks. But in 20 years of following politics, never have I seen behavior like what I’m seeing from the Hillbots.

You are still using the fallacious argument that there is a correlation between how one places in a party primary and chances of winning the state. Being able to win in a party primary only measures support within the party, with most primary voters being willing to vote for either candidate in the general election. These states are considered in the conclusions of the posts I linked to.

Party primaries do not correlate with chances of winning in the general election as the population of voters is quite different. Obama’s strength with independents and some Republicans still makes him a stronger general election candidate, even in the states where Clinton has won the Democratic primaries.

Clinton is just too polarizing to be a viable general election candidate. As she essentially supports the same governing philosophy as Bush independents who would otherwise vote for Obama will be more likely to back Obama in the general election or stay home. Clinton already started out with high negatives, and she has only worsened her position in the general election by running such a dirty primary campaign.

neither you nor the links you offered mention the ‘real’ prizes: NJ, Penn, Ohio, Florida.

now there are two kinds of evidence for who will do better in any given state: the primary performance in the state; and the general election polls for that state. HRC has done better in the primaries in three of those four states, and she is likely to do better also in the fourth, Penn.

And HRC does better in the polls for the general election in all of those four states

so both sources of evidence suggest that HRC is the better candidate than Obama in the four states that are likely to be the most important in november