The Washington Post’s Paul Kane explains why the Democratic nomination will not be decided by the voting process:
[I]t is now basically mathematically impossible for either Clinton or Obama to win the nomination through the regular voting process (meaning the super-delegates decide this one, baby!).
Here’s the math. There are 3,253 pledged delegates, those doled out based on actual voting in primaries and caucuses. And you need 2,025 to win the nomination.
To date, about 55% of those 3,253 delegates have been pledged in the voting process — with Clinton and Obamb roughly splitting them at about 900 delegates a piece.
That means there are now only about 1,400 delegates left up for grabs in the remaining states and territories voting.
So, do the math. If they both have about 900 pledged delegates so far, they need to win more than 1,100 of the remaining 1,400 delegates to win the nomination through actual voting.
Ain’t gonna happen, barring a stunning scandal or some new crazy revelation. So, they’ll keep fighting this thing out, each accumulating their chunk of delegates, one of them holding a slight edge and bothing finishing the voting process with 1,600 or so delegates.
And then the super delegates decide this thing.
That’s the math.
Brendan Loy made pretty much the same argument:
The math is pretty straightforward. In order to reach 2,025 without depending on superdelegates, either Obama or Clinton would need to win something like 80% of the remaining pledged delegates. Obviously, in a tight race governed by proportional allocation rules, there is no way on God’s green earth that’s going to happen. In fact, I’d say any ratio more lopsided than, say, 60-40, seems totally outlandish under the circumstances.
So… where does that leave us? Assuming that neither candidate collects more than 60% of the remaining 1,428 pledged delegates, nobody will have more than 1,765, or thereabouts, of the 3,253 pledged delegates when all is said and done. The leader will thus finish somewhere between 250 and 400 delegates short of the magical “needed to nominate” finish line (2,025), with the trailing candidate no more than ~550 delegates away. It’ll be up to the 800 superdelegates to decide whom to push over the finish line.
I think they’re both right, which puts the superdelegates in the interesting position of having to decide whether the wife of a former President will herself be their parties nominee. My guess is that they’ll go for Obama.
And, oh yeah, you’re right Brendan, you do deserve a hat tip from Paul Kane !
March 4th, 2008 at 5:05 pm
[...] — simply isn’t tenable, meaning we’re back to the same place we were just after Super Tuesday. [...]