Pat Dollard | Young Americans

The Fix:

There are 10 primaries and 71 days left in the Democratic nomination fight between Hillary Rodham Clinton and Barack Obama.

But with those ten elections likely to split relatively evenly between Clinton (Pennsylvania, West Virginia, Kentucky and Puerto Rico) and Obama (North Carolina, Oregon, Montana, Guam and South Dakota), Democratic primary voters aren’t likely to produce a definitive nominee any time soon.

Thus, the Clinton campaign appears to be making appeals more and more directly to the party’s superdelegates who will ultimately decide the winner.

(Yes, we know we left out Indiana in the list of states above, but the Hoosier State may be the final true battleground between the two candidates and deserves a post of its own that we will give it later this week.)

In a conference call earlier today, the Clinton communications duo of Howard Wolfson and Phil Singer spent most of their time making the electability case.

Referring to the ongoing dispute over what to do with delegates in Florida and Michigan, Singer predicted that “there will not be a Democratic president without winning one of those two states.” He added that by opposing efforts to schedule re-votes in the two states, Obama is “handing on a silver platter an issue to Republicans to use against us” and attempting to win the nomination “at the expense of the general.”

Wolfson, the campaign’s communications director, echoed that sentiment. “If you can’t compete in Ohio and Pennsylvania, [and you are] systematically disenfranchising voters in Michigan and Florida, you are not setting yourself up particularly well for a general election,” said Wolfson. He went on to ask (rhetorically) why the Obama campaign was having such a difficult time being competitive in Pennsylvania.

The electability argument as a broad campaign message has been almost entirely ineffective for Clinton to date — if exit polling is to be believed. In none of the 27 states for which The Washington Post purchased exit polls did more than 12 percent of those sampled cite electability as the key characteristic in making up their mind about a candidate.

And even among those who said electability was the most important issue, Obama won those voters at least as often as Clinton did. In Ohio, for example, six percent of voters said electability was the key attribute they were looking for in picking a candidate, but Obama took that bloc by 51 percent to 47 percent even as Clinton won a clear victory statewide. Similarly, in Massachusetts, another state won by Clinton, ten percent of voters said electability was crucial to their decision, and Obama carried that group by twelve points.

But the decision by the Clinton campaign to focus so heavily on electability speaks to their belief that it still has real potential to sway superdelegates — the party insiders who will be left to pick the nominee in the wake of a primary season that failed to produce a clear winner.

As we have written before, superdelegates are primarily politicians who will likely back the candidate they believe will help their short- and long-term interests. The goal for the Clinton campaign is to use the time between now and June 3 — when South Dakota holds the final 2008 primary — to sow doubts about Obama among the superdelegates.

The single clearest path for Clinton to the nomination is a broad reevaluation of Obama by the superdelegates. The controversy surrounding Rev. Jeremiah Wright provided an opening for the Clinton campaign to begin that argument in earnest, although the endorsement of Obama by Gov. Bill Richardson (N.M.) late last week may have blunted it somewhat.

Remember that while the public side of the race between now and June 3 will focus on places like Pennsylvania, North Carolina and beyond, the private — and more important — side of the contest is the case being made to undecided superdelegates.