Thursday, March 06, 2008

my math

Using Slate's delegate calculator, and giving Hillary the benefit of the doubt in many upcoming races, i.e., giving her a ten-point lead in Pennsylvania and the win in Guam, West Virginia, Kentucky and Puerto Rico, and giving Obama only relatively modest wins in Mississippi, Oregon, North Carolina, Wyoming, Indiana, Montana and South Dakota, that still would leave Obama with 137 lead in pledged delegates and a total of 1673 delegates. With these numbers, Obama would need 352 superdelegates to reach the 'magic number' of 2025. That's less than half the superdelegates. According to 2008 Democratic Convention Watch (.com), Obama has 199 superdelegates in his camp at the moment. That means holding on to those superd's and gaining 153 more. Basically, Obama has to just stay viable for the rest of the race, and with every state he survives from here on out, the closer that he gets to saying that he has the magic number and the fewer are the chances for a Clinton resurgence.

The bad news for the Hillary campaign is that effectively the only way she can win at this point is to somehow destroy Obama utterly, which seems unlikely, or to resurrect Michigan and Florida, which will piss off a lot of the superdelegates, as party insiders, and will give off the air of breaking the rules. Even then, it's a long shot. The numbers are close, but the numbers are tight.

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