What would it take for Bernie Sanders to get the nomination?

He is pretty far behind, but I think he still has a chance. How likely is he to get the nomination and what would it take?

He has, essentially, no chance at all.
He would have to get something like 75% or more of the vote in every primary coming up to surpass the lead that Ms. Clinton already has.
About the only chance Mr. Sanders has is if Ms Clinton gets hit by a bus or has a heart attack.

And then he’d have to swing the Superdelegates - the party faithful - the party faithful for a party he’s never raised money for, has not identified with.

Huh. Quoted while I was editing. Haven’t seen that before.

There are 4,051 total pledged delegates. Assuming the superdelegates will have no impact at all on the nomination, meaning they will blindly support 100% the pledged delegate leader, the math works like this:

2031 delegates have been allocated
Clinton has 1,176
Sanders has 855

To number to win is 2026

Sanders needs 1171 more delegates, out of 2020 remaining, or 57.9% of the remaining delegates.

Strictly speaking it is possible; a common refrain among the Sanders die hards is that we just finished the “first half” of the primary, so Sanders has an equal opportunity to finish the second half just as strongly as Hillary did. That’s true, in a very strict mathematical sense. In a practical sense it isn’t true at all. The reason Hillary has been able to build up a 321 pledged delegate lead in the “first half” is because of commanding wins throughout the South.

Sanders supporters will tell you this region is particularly bad for him–and they are 100% correct. The whites in the South are more conservative, even in a Democratic primary, than in other regions. The blacks in the South overwhelmingly support Clinton (they support her by a wide margin in the Northern/Midwestern states that have voted as well, but not by as wide a margin as in the South.)

All of this is true. But for it to be relevant there’d need to be an expectation of a few things.

  1. No more elections like that are on the calendar. In fact there’s actually a few: Maryland, D.C., and Puerto Rico. Now admittedly, combined these three contests allocate 175 delegates, so it’s not a huge number–but it already undermines the “second half” theory. Under the second half theory Sanders really can’t have any states break for Hillary as strong as states like Georgia, Alabama, Arkansas etc did. Well, he can afford a few, but only very small states. If you look at “mirroring the first half”, basically two states, with a total of 40 delegates broke for Sanders that hard, so he could “concede” that number, in theory.

  2. It assumes there are mirrors for Sanders that reflect Clinton’s support in the South. So far we haven’t seen any evidence of that. In fact if you look at Clinton’s wins over Sanders in the South she came away with 2.7x his # of delegates in South Carolina, 4.8x in Alabama, 2.2x in Arkansas, 2.6x in Georgia, 2x in Texas, 1.8x in Virginia, 2.6x in Louisiana, 8x in Mississippi, 1.9x in Florida. Now yeah, Sanders has had similar rompings of Hillary in a few places–like Vermont where he got 16 delegates to her 0, but that means a lot less than Hillary getting 2:1 delegates out of Texas, which awarded a total of 222. Sanders has also done this in Kansas, where he got 2.6x the delegates that Hillary did, “Democrats Abroad” where he got 2.2x. But these are all his best contests. They also were in places that do not award many delegates.

Mathematically he could just win straight to the end with 58% of the delegates in each State (which still represents the difficult task of beating Hillary by 16 points in every single one of the 28 contests remaining. But that just won’t happen. Some states Hillary is stronger and some she is weaker. The realistic scenario (if there is one) would require Sanders to win big in some larger states, to counteract states where ties or marginal Hillary wins are likely. This would require he be able to say, beat Hillary by 30 pts in places like Washington, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania. Then he could split places like Arizona, Hawaii, New York, Maryland.

But even the math on that just doesn’t work. Giving “favorable splits” on states we expect to be contested (I basically assigned the candidates what FiveThirtyEight set as their “targets” in their demographic target tracker), which by the way includes unlikely scenarios like Clinton and Sanders tying Puerto Rico 30:30, I then went and gave Sanders “real big wins” in states where I think he could outperform: Washington, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, Oregon. Now, I wouldn’t be shocked if he does win big in a few of the smaller states, but I’m giving him unrealistically big wins in some of these larger states basically to show the level of task ahead of him, and thus modeling the small states individually wouldn’t make much of a difference.

So say he wins 74% of the delegates in Washington, 55% in Wisconsin, 65% in Pennsylvania and 80% in Oregon. That still has the primary ending with Clinton getting 2066 total pledged delegates, and Sanders 1947, so he still falls 79 short.

Note that while you can look up the demographic targets yourself, this still has Sanders doing well elsewhere, for example taking 50.6% of New York’s delegates, 50.3% of California’s, winning healthily in places like South Dakota, West Virginia, Wyoming, Utah, Idaho, even Arizona. Slight wins in Kentucky, and losses in DC, Jersey, Maryland and Delaware. Essentially of the 28 remaining contests he wins all but 7, and of those 7 he ties 3 and only outright loses (in delegate count) 4. I doubt very seriously the real elections turn out remotely like this, but I think this is closer to a “potential reality in which Sanders rockets to the moon” versus one where he just wins a flat 58% of every single one of the 28 states remaining. Even in this scenario which I think is incredibly generous to him, he comes up short.

  1. The biggest assumption is it assumes of the 400+ superdelegates committed, a large portion would switch sides if he ground out a close win in pledged delegates. There isn’t necessarily evidence of that from the past, so we shouldn’t assume it is true.

As far as the supers go 538 put it well:

Yes cataclysms do, rarely, occur. It is not literally impossible. She could have a stroke tomorrow and insist on continuing to run even as she cannot speak. You never know. And if such a cataclysm occurred likely the supers would switch in droves too.

Haven’t you read the 20 other threads asking this exact question and the getting the exact same answers?

Perhaps if Clinton got indicted for the email scandal.

Or if monkeys flew out of my butt.

Thanks for the exhaustive analysis, Martin Hyde. Glad someone else is willing to run the numbers, rather than give an off the top of the head answer. :smiley:

Sanders is behind in both California & NY. He has no chance. In order for him to win he has to win almost 60% of the delegates in the remaining races, and that isn’t possible.

He would have to persuade Hillary to drop out. And the only way conceivable for him to do that would be to seduce her.

And that’s no challenge at all, for such a sexy macho dude who has that whole Elderly-Ashkenazi-Charm thing goin’ on! Them blonde WASP Wellesley girls just cream! :slight_smile:

And, c’mon, Hillary – you know you’ve wanted a chance for payback ever since Blowjobgate! What’s Bill going to think when he walks in on you eating kosher meat and juicy matzoh-balls?! :smiley:

Just one thing to add to Martin Hyde’s excellent analysis.

The big issue for Sanders has certainly been demographics/geography, specifically not doing well in the South and among minorities; and there’s no question that the remaining states will *generally *be easier for him on that count.

But there’s also an issue regarding the format for the various votes. Sanders has done very well in caucus states (which makes some sense, as he has some very passionate followers and you have to be passionate to go spend two or three hours listening to speeches and such if you want to vote).

Of the seven states that have caucused so far (by my count), he won five by very comfortable margins. Demographically, he would probably have done well anyway in states like MN and ME anyway, but the caucus format evidently helped him win these states by a lot. He almost won Iowa, too. The only caucus state he lost was Nevada, where he certainly didn’t get blown out and where the demographics weren’t all that favorable.

So caucuses have been good for Sanders. But there are only five caucuses left, including today’s in Idaho, and four of them are in some of the smallest states in the country (AK, HI, ID, and WY, which together have six representatives in the House); the only remaining big state with a caucus is Washington. Caucuses have been good for Sanders, but the benefit he’s gotten from them is about to go up in smoke.

The other thing is that the type of primary is about to shift, dramatically. Most of the primaries to date (even in the South) have been some form of open primary, where you can cast a ballot in the Dem primary even if you aren’t a “registered Democrat.”

These have been good for Sanders, too, except of course in the South. He won New Hampshire by a lot, he won Oklahoma comfortably; he swept VT, of course. He also won Michigan and came close to winning IL, MO, and MA, all of which allowed ballots from people who haven’t declared themselves to be Democrats.

Again this makes some sense: the senator is attractive to people who may not have voted before, and to people who don’t necessarily wish to affiliate themselves with a party (like Sanders himself, up to now).

But most of the remaining primaries are closed. You have to be a Democrat to vote in them. So far, there have been two closed primaries, Louisiana and FL; neither state is favorable to Sanders demographically, but he got clobbered in both. Upcoming we have ten closed primaries, many of them in large states: NY, PA, MD, NJ, and OR, in addition to AZ today.

The bottom line: we go from a first half that’s heavy on caucuses and extremely heavy on open primaries (both favorable to Sanders) to a second half that’s more about primaries in general and much more focused on closed primaries in particular (unfavorable to Sanders). True, you never know what *might *happen, but for this reason alone it’s going to be very hard for Sanders to make up ground.

What would it take for Sanders to get the nomination? It would take the majority of the Democratic electorate to take leave of its senses.

I don’t know what other states caucuses are like, but in Minnesota you can go in and fill out a Presidential Preference Ballot and be out fairly quickly - no speeches involved. The issue is that you have to do it on the Tuesday night starting at 7pm and the whole thing is done by 8:30 - well, except for the geeks who want to make platform changes or rule changes or want to be delegates at a district level.

Yeah, I don’t know exactly how it’s done in different states, though I know it does vary; sorry if I didn’t get MN quite right.

My point is mostly that caucus states (whether because they force you to be there at a certain time, or because there are fewer “polling places,” or because they make you spend a long time there) have a strong depressive effect on turnout.

In MN, for instance, there were about 200K votes cast. Alabama, with half a million fewer people, but with a primary, had almost twice as many voters. Kansas, a caucus state, had less than 40,000 voters; Mississippi, with a very similar population, had almost 220,000 at the polls in its primary.

Anyway, these low turnouts in caucus states, whatever the reason for them, have tended to benefit Sanders. How’s that? :slight_smile:

I understand the MN state legislature is now discussing switching to a primary. IMO, this would be a welcome change as the caucuses were kind of a mess. You’d never guess the turnout was as low as you stated, since everyone is trying to vote all at the same time (7pm) my polling place had lines around the block, literally. I’d also estimate that 95% (if not more) were just voting and leaving, like I did. I waited in line for about an hour, it took about 20 seconds to sign in and vote, then I walked home. Going in, I had no idea what to expect (i.e. speeches, standing with people voting the same, raising hands… etc)

300k for Minnesota with the GOP and the DFL (our weird version of Democrats), but yes, caucuses are a pain in the butt compared to a primary where the polls are open all day. They exclude those that need to work or can’t arrange childcare. We hold them in our schools and people part a mile away because there isn’t enough parking to handle the minority of voters that do bother. I do hope Minnesota changes over to primaries.

I think Sanders would have done well here with primaries though. On the Democratic side, we are a state of Nordic liberals. Whiter than many states.

Right, since we’re just talking about Sanders’s shot at a comeback I was giving only the Democratic figures.

Agree that Sanders would’ve probably won Minnesota anyway. But I suspect the margin wouldn’t have been quite as big.

I have never lived in a caucus state. Every now and again I kind of wish I did; sounds like it might be kind of fun. Then I realize the drawbacks–this spring, for instance, I teach a college class two evenings a week, so I could easily be shut out altogether. Not good. (Can you vote absentee? I’m pretty sure there are caucus states in which you can’t.) Having the polls open on primary day from 6 am to 9 pm, as they are in my state, is a blessing…