It was all a bit puzzling for Avinash Godbole as he watched his first American election.
Godbole (pictured), a visiting fellow in Chinese studies from Nehru University in India, joined some colleagues at a Super Pundit party for Super Tuesday. Some 100 people squeezed into the Common Room at Yale’s MacMillan Center on Hillhouse Avenue to watch the presidential primary returns along with live commentary by three of the university’s top political scientists.
“This is more chaotic than Indian elections to me because I really don’t know what is going on,” Godbole said. In India, there are many national and regional parties, which pick candidates to stand for the parliament.
He said it is illegal for the media in India to predict the election results until 5 p.m. on the last day of a multiday election. He was a bit shocked about the predictions made by the MSNBC crew before polls closed in California and other Western states.
At first glance, the crowd looked as if it had come to watch the Super Bowl, complete with experts to tell them why their favorite had won or lost as television images danced across a huge screen and food and drink waited in another room.
The Super Bowl was two days past, however, and this was Super Tuesday. The game was politics. Professors Jacob Hacker (named in this New York Times story as a possible cabinet member in a Barack Obama administration), David Mayhew and Alan Gerber, left to right in photo, provided the commentary.
There were so many people that the chicken, veal parmigiana and baked ziti ran out, and pizza had to be ordered. (This is New Haven, after all.) Yale professor Ian Shapiro, director of the MacMillan Center, said he had underestimated the interest in the primaries, recalling that fewer people had turned out for the general election in 2004.
Most of the Yale students, many from foreign nations, plus Yale staff, teachers and guests cheered when Obama was declared the winner in Illinois and booed when Hillary Rodham Clinton scored a victory in Oklahoma, a pattern that would be repeated throughout the night. Less than a quarter of the crowd was left, however, when Obama was declared the winner in Connecticut after 10:30 p.m.
Before the first polls were to close at 8 p.m., Mayhew, Sterling professor of political science, prepped the crowd, explaining the system of delegates and super delegates on the Democratic side, and the all-or-nothing primaries in some GOP states. He said he didn’t think the Democrats would settle the issue of who would be the party’s standard-bearer in November, a prediction borne out as the evening wore on.
He noted to a reporter that there are still huge primaries in Pennsylvania, Texas and Ohio to be decided in the weeks to come in which there would be voting by large numbers of Hispanics and rural-dwellers, both of whom are likely to support Clinton.
He said California was not as important as the television pundits said and urged the audience to watch what happened in Missouri, Connecticut and New Jersey.
Gerber, a professor of political science and director of the Center for the Study of American Politics, predicted — correctly, as it turned out — that Clinton and Obama were likely to roughly split the delegates in a very close vote Tuesday.
He said the public relations war would begin Wednesday morning and, and the spin doctors would take over.
On the Republican side, “McCain is in very good shape to be the nominee pretty darn soon,” he said. [Mitt Romney failed to make a needed last stand in the South, where Mike Huckabee prevailed instead.]
Although McCain was clearly the winner in GOP primaries, this crowd was clearly more interested in Democratic Party results.
Hacker, professor of political science and fesident fellow of the Institution for Social and Policy Studies, said it would be “hard to handicap Obama and Clinton in the general election,” saying that Obama could win big or lose big in the general election, while Clinton was the safer bet but had less “upside potential.”
“I think this will be a Democratic year for Congress,” raising the possibility “ of a fairly liberal Democratic Congress with a fairly liberal Democrat in the White House.”
It was now about 9 p.m., and a cheer went up from the crowd when the television, tuned to MSNBC, showed Obama leading in Connecticut, but the pundits kept labeling the state as too close to call.
Dan Hopkins of Cambridge, Mass., and Justin Fox of Monticello, N.Y., both Obama supporters, were having a great time, even after Clinton won both their states.
“I thought it would be this close” in the Bay State, he said. “There are a lot of machine Democrats” in Massachusetts, he said.
Brian Dobbins and Alexandra Barton-Sweeney, in photo, both of whom work for Yale, are ardent Democrats, although their opinions differed slightly.
Dobbins was “strong for Obama”, while his friend said she would be “happy either way” as long as the Democrats won. She said she had dabbled in politics before, but this is the first time she was following the race so closely.
It was getting close to the 10 p.m. planned end of the party, but a couple of dozen true believers were waiting to see their man win Connecticut. They would have to wait more than a half hour before the pundits put the state into the Obama camp.
Mayhew said Wednesday would bring “outrageous claims” by the campaigns as they tried to spin the results to fit their candidate. He likened the campaigns going forward to World War I, with “trench warfare.”
Hacker said he was disillusioned with the way Clinton’s and Obama’s health initiatives, both of which he helped craft, were being portrayed. He feared that the Democrats would find a way “to screw things up. I think this has gotten to destructive level already,” he said.
Gerber, shown on the right with his colleagues as the television picture is mirrored in the MacMillan Center window behind them, said he was surprised with Obama’s showing in Connecticut because the Illinois senator was 15 points behind just a couple of weeks ago.
Mayhew attributed Obama’s surge to “the Ned Lamont vote” in Fairfield County, although New Haven voted for Obama in a big way, too. Lamont was the Democratic candidate for the Senate seat eventually won by Sen. Joseph I. Lieberman in the 2006 general election. Lieberman has endorsed McCain.
As 10 p.m. neared, Mayhew had said he thought Sen. Edward M. Kennedy’s endorsement of Obama was more a hindrance than a help, citing polling results in which respondents said they were less likely to vote for Obama after the backing of the Kennedy clan.
Just as in the Super Bowl two days before, fans of the winning team had to wait until time nearly ran out before getting satisfaction. It was about 10:35, and Shapiro had decided to keep the party going past its 10 p.m. planned end.
With more than half the Connecticut vote counted and Obama thousands of votes ahead, the networks finally awarded the state to the senator from Illinois.
There was a shout of joy and looks of satisfaction from the smattering of true believers who were left.
One man was asked in passing if he now intends to work for Obama.
“I’m going to have to,” he said.