WASHINGTON -- The fight for the Democratic presidential nomination may come down to a question: Would Barack Obama or Hillary Clinton be the stronger candidate in November?
"What you have to ask yourself is who you believe would be the better nominee to go toe-to-toe against John McCain," Clinton said after beating Obama in Pennsylvania last week.
Clinton can't win the most delegates in the primaries, so she is framing the choice for the party's superdelegates - who will likely settle the nomination - around that question.
Obama, who would become the nominee if the superdelegates simply ratify the primary and caucus results, is playing along, though his performance over the last few weeks has done little, if anything, to advance the case for his electability.
Deciding which Democrat has the better chance of winning the presidency isn't nearly as simple as it might seem, according to independent analysts and party strategists who aren't working for either candidate.
"It's more or less pick 'em, if you were a handicapper," said Andrew Kohut, whose independent Pew Research Center has polled nationally and in battleground states. "You'd say you can't make the case for either one."
National opinion surveys illustrate his point. In the Gallup Poll's latest election match-ups, Clinton and Obama are both locked in statistical ties with McCain ("That's much closer than you'd expect for a Republican candidate, given all the Democratic advantages" this election year, Kohut pointed out).
At the moment, concluding which candidate is more electable appears more of an art (that is, educated guesswork) than science.
A highly unscientific sample of those interviewed for this article came down on the side of Obama's superior electability, but the view wasn't unanimous. Some saw him as only marginally stronger, and no one said that Clinton's argument was unreasonable.
"It's not crazy. It's not an absurd case. It's a debatable question," said Stuart Rothenberg, who publishes an independent election newsletter. "There are clearly some Democrats in some key states who aren't going to vote for Obama: older voters, blue-collar voters, the old Reagan Democrats."
Clinton's strategy is to keep the race going as long as possible, in hopes that doubts about Obama will grow. Already, his position "has been eroded" by losing big industrial state primaries, said Rothenberg. It "reminds people who weren't paying attention that he has trouble with a key Democratic voter constituency" - working-class voters.
