This morning the Associated Press gets a top-of-the-Drudge-Report link to it’s story about the fact that both time and numbers are not in Hillary Clinton’s favor:
WASHINGTON (AP) - Time is running out on Hillary Rodham Clinton, the long-ago front- runner for the Democratic presidential nomination who now trails Barack Obama in delegates, states won and popular votes.
Compounding Clinton’s woes, Obama appears on track to finish the primary campaign fewer than 100 delegates shy of the 2,025 needed to win.
Clinton argues to Democratic officialdom that other factors should count, an unprovable assertion that she’s more electable chief among them. But she undercut her own claim in Wednesday night’s debate, answering “yes, yes, yes” when asked whether her rival could win the White House.
There’s little if any public evidence the party’s elite, the superdelegates who will attend the convention, are buying her argument anyway.
More importantly, he delegate math, which I’ve been talking about since February — here, here, here, and here — looks really bad if you’re a Clinton supporter:
Overall, Obama’s delegate lead is 1,645-1,507. That masks an even larger advantage among those won in primaries and caucuses. There, his advantage is 1,414-1,250.
An additional 566 are at stake in the remaining contests in eight states, Guam and Puerto Rico before the primary season ends on June 3.
If Obama captures 53 percent of them, which is the share he has gained in contests to date, he would close out the primary season with at least 1,945 delegates, only 80 less than the total needed to clinch the nomination. If he and Clinton split the 566 evenly, he would still be within 100 of the number needed.
Clinton needs to win a forbidding 65 percent of the delegates in the remaining primaries to draw even with Obama in pledged delegates. It’s a share she has achieved only once so far, in Arkansas, where her husband was governor for more than a decade.
And that quite simply isn’t going to happen, not with Democratic delegates awarded on a proportional representation basis. Not only won’t Clinton overtake Obama in pledged delegates, she won’t even come close to doing so.
Absent a double digit win on Tuesday, I would guess that the pressure on her to withdraw will increase exponentially.
