Clinton bids for West Virginia boost

By Kevin Connolly
BBC News, Washington

The demographics of West Virginia favour Mrs Clinton

If the cable news pundits and editorial page writers of America are to be believed then the race for the Democratic Party's presidential nomination is over and Barack Obama is the winner.

The Clinton die-hards battling on through the last handful of primaries from West Virginia to South Dakota must be starting to feel like those Japanese soldiers who used to turn up on Pacific islands decades after the end of the Second World War, still refusing to believe it was really over.

The West Virginia primary certainly feels like a minor skirmish, taking place long after the main fighting has already taken place elsewhere, so even though it promises an easy victory for Senator Clinton, it will do little to change the overall course of the battle.

Sentimental song

The state is small and poor - it has a population of less than two million and is third from bottom in the ranking of average household incomes in the US.

It has a Development Office charged with drawing the state to the attention of the wider world and attracting investment, but it has done less to publicise the West Virginia brand around the world than the singer John Denver who immortalised the Mountain State in his sentimental song "Take Me Home, Country Roads".

From Hillary Clinton's perspective, it is a pity that West Virginia is not the size of Texas or California since it contains huge proportions of the various demographic groups she has been winning by miles in previous contests.

The population is older than average, more than 95% white, and contains the lowest proportion of college graduates in the whole of the United States.

Senator Clinton is performing tirelessly in West Virginia... in a remarkable display of energy, defiance and self-belief

It is a blue-collar economy, powered by coal.

Mrs Clinton, who has been doing well with older voters, and with white, working-class men who did not go to college, is politically right at home here - I could not find an opinion poll giving Mr Obama more than 27% of the vote and in one of them she is 39 percentage points clear of her rival.

That does not explain though, why Mrs Clinton is still running with such energy in a race which more and more people are concluding she simply has no chance of winning.

Hopelessly unlikely

One obvious explanation, of course, is that she does not agree with those TV pundits and newspaper writers although it is increasingly hard to see how she can believe that.

It is now nigh on impossible for her to match Barack Obama's number of delegates earned through the ballot box and since Sunday he has more of those famous super-delegates (the Democratic Party's elected representatives and senior officials who account for about 20% of the vote at the party's nominating convention).

That leaves two ways in which she could win, at least in theory, although both seem hopelessly unlikely to me.

First, she could have the votes from the primaries in Florida and Michigan counted (they were declared void by the party in a dispute over the election timetable).

Mr Obama appears to have weathered the storm over his former pastor

Then she might come out ahead of him in the overall popular vote - that would allow her to argue that by at least one criterion, she had won.

It might make her look a bit ridiculous (she never criticised the delegate system when she thought she was going to win), but then Mrs Clinton seems to have what one of her supporters called the "testicular fortitude" to carry off that kind of handbrake turn.

Her second strategy could be to hope that events will trip up her rival.

Mr Obama in the end survived the antics of his old pastor Jeremiah Wright on the national stage, but who is to say that Mr Wright will not return with more lurid opinions - or that something else will emerge from the past to ruffle Mr Obama's increasingly confident demeanour.

Great campaigner

Those are both long-shot scenarios of course.

But Mrs Clinton's ability to get up when she is knocked down is partly fuelled by that kind of incurable optimism.

And what if this is no longer about winning the 2008 nomination at all?

What if Mrs Clinton has some other objective in mind?

Here are three scenarios - as journalists like to dignify their guesswork - that might explain why she is still running even if she has privately accepted that the race is lost.

First, she might want to be the vice-presidential nominee.

Unlikely, and there are plenty of Obama supporters who think he would be crazy to have her, but you never know.

Second, her campaign is $20m (£10m) in debt and it is possible she might try to cut some sort of deal which would involve using his cash surplus to help with that in some way.

And finally - and this is good news for those of you wearying of Primary Season 2008 - she might be looking beyond an Obama defeat in November and contemplating running for the nomination in 2012.

Whatever the reason though, Senator Clinton is performing tirelessly in West Virginia, as she has campaigned everywhere since Iowa, in a remarkable display of energy, defiance and self-belief.

She will always be a polarising figure in American politics and may have won few new friends for the way she has run this year.

But she compels admiration as she battles for every vote even as her apparently inevitable defeat beckons.

She is a great campaigner who will be the last to accept failure - even if that means that she will always be more admired than loved.