It’s half-time. Clinton is up by 26 points, 3 TD, a FG, and a safety. He’s already been sacked a couple of times, and his defense is leaving 3rd and short plays that are easily converted. Bernie will receive to start the second half, it looks like at best he’ll only get 3 points and chew up a lot of clock. Maybe if he scores a TD and a 2 point conversion instead he’ll look like he still has a chance, but still not a great one.
And you should have seen it before all my tinkering…
I got so focused at tinkering that I forgot to give the link, which is RealClearPolitics.
Back to the math. Clinton has 1227 delegates. She needs 1155 of the 2761 remaining. That’s 42%. She only needs 59% if you ignore all superdelegates. You can’t, nor can you assume that they will suddenly switch to Sanders en masse while Clinton is still in the race. If you assume that she continues to get superdelegates proportionally, say 200 more, then she only needs 34%. Which is 100%-Sander’s 66%+1%, so the math works out properly.
That’s a breeze. There is no more contest, just grinding out the rest of the season.
Top of the ninth, one out, he’s five runs down with no one on base. Clinton’s closer is pitching, and even if he comes back to tie, as the home team she still has the superdelegates and convention going for her in the bottom of the inning.
If Bernie manages to get a majority of the pledged delegates, a great many Supers will defect. No doubt about it. Just like for Obama.
Ultimately the superdelegates have to be irrelevant–except perceptually, before the pledged delegates are allocated, as we see here. Failing to support the actual primary winner would seriously hurt the party.
Ignore superdelegates for a second.
Being behind, as of now, [checks 538’s reported numbers] 225 delegates, is simply insurmountable. Plus in 3 days another 691 pledged delegates are to be decided, and while the possibility of another epic polling fail exists, his competition is polling 20 to 34 points ahead in the 4 bigger states.
If say he relatively reasonably overperforms relative to the polls and averages only 20 points down, 60/40, after Tuesday it will be a pledged delegate count deficit of about 364.
If she only wins Florida (closed primary, more predictable) by polling margins and ties every else, maybe narrow win Ohio and narrow loss Illinois, his deficit still increases to 296.
Essentially if this was baseball it would be him down by 9 runs, Team Clinton up, no outs, bases loaded, top of her line up.
But this is not sports and no analogy really fits. What can happen (albeit still improbable) is that he can keep going and hit a run of smaller delegate state wins, maybe even shrink the delegate count slightly … Best possible longshot hope? Way way overperform by hitting her hard on her perceived negatives and get the pledged delegate deficit back down under 100, then use that relatively strong finish and absolute number of states won to go to convention and fight that Clinton is a weak candidate and keep it up with however negative your team will go on your behalf, in hope that the supers will see her as so damaged that they will choose you over her even though she has a pledged delegate and popular vote majority. Yes superdelegates failing to support the actual primary winner is his best chance. Not a rational hope but egos get involved.
See the problem is that it is a different sort of sport, one in which the next inning hopefully has both players on the same team. They really need to play with that in mind.
206 delegates down. 748-542
http://www.realclearpolitics.com/epolls/2016/president/democratic_delegate_count.html
But yes, it could get a lot uglier by Tuesday evening.
At the end of the first round, Ronda Rousey has already bloodied her opponent and delivered two knockdowns while only taking a few shots herself. That kick to the head for that first knockdown was brutal! I gotta admit, her upstart opponent is the better looking of the two, but we’ve seen how this story ends before…
CarnalK,
225 delegates down. 776-551
Or go with 221 down. 772-551
Honestly not sure why the divergence in the reports by site, so we’ll leave at somewhere between 206 and 225 down. Decide which site you believe for adding things up.
But yes we quibble. Being over 200 down with these states polling these numbers coming up to the plate, is well … in the analogy, even keeping FL to a double and three up three down for the others, puts Team Bernie even deeper in the hole. And if they all hit even half as well as scouting reports expect them to, well … well, words and analogies fail.
huh. And TheGreenPapers has it at 552-775 for a difference of 223. So I concede it`s probably closer to the high end but wtf.
Yeah, I have a spreadsheet I’m maintaining to track the delegate differentials, the % needed to win, and the differential versus the 538 “Targets.” I was using the RCP delegates page to update it for awhile, but RCP is the “most conservative” of the sites tracking delegates, meaning they seem to leave a decent chunk of delegates unallocated after a primary for a really long time. I’m just using 538 now, The Green Papers has amazing information on it but UI wise it’s more tedious to navigate. I believe RCP must be waiting on some official, Secretary of State or etc type verification of how many delegates each candidate won. I believe FiveThirtyEight and a few other sites instead just wait for 100% of precincts to be in, then just run the math themselves. So RCP is largely just going to be “out of date” for a long time, but also probably will make fewer mistakes because it’s strict about when it determines delegates “won” or not.
Also, while I’ve mostly wanted to ignore the superdelegate issue, I don’t buy into the popular wisdom that there is 0% chance they could save Hillary from a close pledged delegate loss. There is no real evidence that will happen. To address some of that:
-
In 2008 I believe at most Hillary had like a 120 superdelegate lead over Obama at one point, so it was never as big as the lead Hillary has over Bernie right now.
-
In 2008, while some supers who had previously openly pledged support to HRC did flip to Obama, the majority of his superdelegate margin he eventually had over Clinton was made up of superdelegates who had never declared, and declared for him.
At the end of campaigning in 2008 Hillary had 246.5 superdelegates, Obama had 478, about 50 of those had switched from Hillary at some point in the primary to Obama. But when campaigning came to an end and Obama and Hillary had both failed to win a majority of pledged delegates (a situation possible because Edwards had won enough delegates before dropping out–in 2016 this essentially could not happen since it’s a true two person race) what started to happen is the ~50% or so of superdelegates who had never publicly pledged support to either candidate came out en masse for Obama to support him as the pledged delegate plurality winner.
-
So while the superdelegates have never taken the nomination away from the pledged delegate winner, I’m also not aware of a scenario in which 400+ of them switched sides, and if Hillary keeps it close til the very end she’s likely to pick up more superdelegate public pledges.
-
I think there’s a decent argument that Sanders is much more of an “outsider” than any Democratic nominee since superdelegates were created. Obama had the support of the base of the party, Sanders does not (I’m calling women and minorities the base of the Democratic party–not far left progressive, namely because the gender gap and minorities are why Democrats when elections in the electoral college, and they make up the majority, combined, of the party, not young leftist progressives.)
… and the BernieBros are wearing their rally caps with “Indict Hillary” written across the front …
I think the more popular wisdom is that the superdelegates have already given Clinton an almost-insurmountable lead. Which is what I described as their perceptual role.
Bottom of the ninth, two out, bases empty, and their closure on the mound. Sure, the game’s not over and I’m sure teams have won under those circumstances, but not often.
I was once watching a delayed telecast of a pre-season game, Eagles vs. Giants. I already knew that the Eagles had won; I think 24-23. With about a minute left, the Giants were ahead 23-10 and I couldn’t believe what I was about to see. Quick TD, onside kick recovered, then another TD. It happens, just not often.
From 538
Before the March 15th primaries.
Bernie is behind Hillary by 4 strokes, 4 holes left.
After the March 15th primaries.
Bernie bogeys the next hole, Hillary gets a birdie.
3 holes left, Hillary has 6 stroke lead. Bernie better hope Hillary shanks one over the rainbow, 2 or 3 times.
My esteemed friend. Football is played with an oval ball, but players are not and never will be armoured up. That way is for prancing daisies not sportsmen.
We may watch with amused fascination but uts not really a sport…
Actually…in that regard i guess your football is to sport what your presidential selection process is to elections in the rest of the world
So Bernie needs to pray for rain?
Bernie can still play hack-a-Shaq with tough counter-campaigning against Hillary and hope that she bricks all of her free throws leading to a convention-disrupting scandal of some sort.
At this point he has to hope the umpire calls a forfeit.
Well, he isn’t mathematically eliminated, despite what anybody says. He needs a blowout in basically every state from here on out, OR, as cochrane says, pray for rain, AKA a Clinton indictment or, god-forbid, her death.
But then again, Bernie’s an independent. If Hillary dies (or steps out of the race for other reasons) there are a lot of party-faithful who might rise up to claim her delegates at the convention. But besides a repeat of the first half of the primary season, only with Bernie and Hillary’s delegate wins swapped, her death/elimination is his best chance.
But hey, I saw the Cardinals come back from a 10-1 deficit in the bottom of the 9th inning to win it once. And Fernando Tatis hit two grand slams in the same inning off the same pitcher. Until the game’s over, anything’s possible.