Quoting Geoff D'Arcy (gdarcy@zeff.org):
At the time, if you'd have accepted and believed your late mother's prediction, do you think you would have changed your vote from Obama to Hillary?
Not sure. That's an interesting question of political tactics, objectives, and estimation of what's feasible, what's vital, and so on. Occasionally, seeming Pyrrhic victories are worth the cost in the long run, but, since one is never able to re-run history with differing inputs, the best approach is anyone's guess. In the strict sense, FYI, Deirdre and I changing our primary election vote would have made no outcome difference: Democratic Party voters in our Congressional district, the California 18th District (southwest San Mateo County), voted something like 80-90% for Obama in the primary. (To correct my earlier post, this was Febrary 2008, not June 2007.) Thus, our district's four Democratic Party delegates (one of 441 seated from California) would have been pledged to Barack Obama irrespective of our two primary votes. More specifically, 241 of the state's 441 were awarded as candidate-pledged delegates at the Congressional district level (such as my 18th District's four delegates chosen pledged to Obama), 129 were awarded as delegates pledged to the California statewide winner (Hillary Clinton[0]), and 71 were 'superdelegates'[1] not obligated to vote for any candidate at the convention. I mention this fact because, in my experience, people discussing politics tend to spend entirely too much time thumb-sucking about philosophical posturing and rather too little understanding how it works. Present company excepted, though, I'm sure. ;-> [0] Statewide among voters participating in the 2008 Democratic Party California primary: 51.47% for Clinton, 43.16% for Obama. Changing this margin the other way would have required 210,762 voters to change their position, not just two. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superdelegate