Can Clinton Wait Until Texas and Ohio?

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The Clinton campaign has made it clear that it is looking ahead to the March 4 primaries in Ohio and Texas. Even before it lost Louisiana, Washington, and Nebraska on Saturday, campaign officials were telling the press that they are effectively conceding everything between Super Tuesday and March 4.

This is a smart move in at least one respect: expectations. The press has a bad habit of not making much of victories unless they are unexpected — if Obama wins by 20 points in three states he was “supposed” to win, there’s little talk of momentum even a day and a half later. So Clinton won’t be hurt if she loses all of the remaining states before March 4–Maryland, Virginia, D.C., Hawaii, and Wisconsin–but she will receive a lot of positive press if she somehow wins one of them. (She lost the Maine caucus on Sunday.)

As a side note, it’s worth pointing out that the Obama campaign doesn’t really play this game. It doesn’t try to manage expectations in the way the Clinton campaign does, which means that Obama is often in a disadvantageous position in the media narrative (a situation mitigated by the fact that the media seems to like him more than it likes Clinton). But to the Obama campaign’s credit, it seemed to have realized that expectations don’t really matter to everyday voters. With the exception of New Hampshire, where voters grew tired of the media’s attempts to bury the Clintons and the Clinton era, voters don’t seem to care what happened in the states before them and how that fits into some grand story being told by Tim Russert and Chris Matthews. They just want a chance to evaluate the candidates and make their own decisions.

Back on point. Is the Clinton strategy of waiting until Texas and Ohio a smart one? I doubt it. It too closely mirrors Rudy Giuliani’s Florida strategy. Giuliani could shake as many hands as he wanted in Florida, but the media coverage about the campaign had him losing state after state after state. He was like a boxer who took blows to the head for four rounds and expected to score a knockout in the fifth. It didn’t happen. If Obama sweeps everything between Feb 5 and March 4, he’ll have won LA, NE, WA, ME, MD, VA, DC, HI, and WI. Doesn’t that reduce Clinton to Rudy 2.0?

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WHO DOESN’T LOVE A POSITIVE STORY—OR TWO?

“Great journalism really does make a difference in this world: it can even save kids.”

That’s what a civil rights lawyer wrote to Julia Lurie, the day after her major investigation into a psychiatric hospital chain that uses foster children as “cash cows” published, letting her know he was using her findings that same day in a hearing to keep a child out of one of the facilities we investigated.

That’s awesome. As is the fact that Julia, who spent a full year reporting this challenging story, promptly heard from a Senate committee that will use her work in their own investigation of Universal Health Services. There’s no doubt her revelations will continue to have a big impact in the months and years to come.

Like another story about Mother Jones’ real-world impact.

This one, a multiyear investigation, published in 2021, exposed conditions in sugar work camps in the Dominican Republic owned by Central Romana—the conglomerate behind brands like C&H and Domino, whose product ends up in our Hershey bars and other sweets. A year ago, the Biden administration banned sugar imports from Central Romana. And just recently, we learned of a previously undisclosed investigation from the Department of Homeland Security, looking into working conditions at Central Romana. How big of a deal is this?

“This could be the first time a corporation would be held criminally liable for forced labor in their own supply chains,” according to a retired special agent we talked to.

Wow.

And it is only because Mother Jones is funded primarily by donations from readers that we can mount ambitious, yearlong—or more—investigations like these two stories that are making waves.

About that: It’s unfathomably hard in the news business right now, and we came up about $28,000 short during our recent fall fundraising campaign. We simply have to make that up soon to avoid falling further behind than can be made up for, or needing to somehow trim $1 million from our budget, like happened last year.

If you can, please support the reporting you get from Mother Jones—that exists to make a difference, not a profit—with a donation of any amount today. We need more donations than normal to come in from this specific blurb to help close our funding gap before it gets any bigger.

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