Here is my bold prediction as of 8:15 this morning: Hillary will have won last night by about five delegates total, and she may yet lose Texas.
- In Vermont, Obama gained 3.
- In Rhode Island Hillary gained 5.
- In Texas, the Office of the Secretary of State says Hillary is only up by four delegates in the primary, but remember there is also a caucus in this state, and I think the caucus (the results are still being tabulated) may reverse that "win" for a net delegate loss for Hillary in Texas.
- In Ohio, Hillary appears to be up 8 delegates, but the provisional ballots (most of them from Cleveland) may narrow that a bit.
And when the dust settles, Obama will still be up 125 or more delegates (and I am not even going to mention the $50 million and 50 super delegate bomb that is rumored to be coming).
Wyoming (March 9) and Mississippi (March 11) are up next and both are expected to break to Obama. With Clinton up only 4-6 points in Pennsylvania, it''s hard to see how she she can get a win out of the remainder states, which are all divided or a loss for her.
Even if "old politics" still works, the "new math" doesn't.
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Note: I corrected this post to reflect the true delegate count in RI; my original source on this was wrong.
While it's become popular of late for pundits to claim that the news media has been strongly pro-Obama / anti-Clinton, I tend to see a different trend: the news media is generally easy for spin machines to manipulate.
ReplyDeleteLet's take the news coverage leading up to yesterday's primaries. The news media allowed the Clinton campaign to dominate headlines with every wild accusation about Obama that the Clinton campaign could dredge up from the sewer. Many say that the late break in the polls for Clinton were caused by this.
The news media also allowed themselves to be manipulated with a claim that a Clinton win in Texas and Ohio would turn the Democratic presidential race around. Actually, that's not true. The delegate count, not “wins”, is what matter. What Clinton needed were huge wins yesterday, in the ballpark of 20 percentage points or more, to make progress on delegates. She fell far short of that goal.
Surely the news media must have noticed by now that (1) the Democrats do not run winner-take-all primaries or caucuses, (2) it's all about gaining the most delegates, and (3) going into yesterday Obama was ahead by about 150-160 pledged delegates.
A couple weeks ago I wrote that Obama was so far ahead in pledged delegates that Clinton would need to win all remaining nominating contests by an average of 16 or 17 percentage points to catch up to Obama on pledged delegates. It's simple math.
After her alleged "big wins" yesterday, Clinton now has to win all remaining nominating contests by about 23 percentage points to catch up to Obama's pledged delegate count. It's simple math.
Now think about this, how was yesterday a "big win" for Clinton if her probability of success actually became even less likely than the long odds she was facing? It's only because the mindless press can be so easily manipulated by the Clinton spin machine that they have created the illusion that yesterday was a "big win" for Clinton. It was not. A modest win or a draw amounts to a loss for Clinton. She did not accomplish what she needed to do. She is closer to losing than she was before yesterday.
You are, of course, right.
ReplyDeleteFour things to know about the press:
1. They are pretty lazy and always on deadline, which means they cannot afford to look too deeply or research too long -- the story is the thing, and everything is subordinate to a good one, even if you have to suppress a few facts or color in a few bits in order to make it sound good or read as well.
2. In a world in which bloggers seem to exist in unlimited numbers, never sleep, and dish it out for free, a paid news reporter has to know how to catch it, kill, cut it up, grill it, and serve it up the finicky patrons at breathtaking speeds, and with out every making an error. Don't be too surprised, under such conditions, that they serve simple -- almost cartoonish -- fare for our consumption.
3. The news is about ratings and sales. Whether it's TV, radio, magazine, or newspaper, 100% of profit is from ads, and the "story" is just the filler that flows in around that. This is the way it has always been, but with ad profits down, it is truer than ever. The first question at CBS every morning is about overnight ratings, not about Truth, Justice or the American Way.
4. All reporters are story-strong and math-challenged. These are the folks that got an "A" in English, but flunked math. What this means is that they can quote you the poem on the Statue of Liberty, but have no idea if a 3% population growth rate is really fast or pretty darn slow. Or as I told one fellow the other day, "75 percent of the problem is perception, but the other 35 percent of the problem is a failure to understand what the numbers really mean." My joke went right past him.
P.
The issue isn't whether Obama can get more delegates than Hillary, it's whether Obama can get 2025.
ReplyDeleteTake a look at this:
http://www.forbes.com/2008/02/27/obama-clinton-election-oped-cx_jb_0227delegates.html
Stick some numbers in, and you'll see that it's nearly impossible for Hillary to get to 2025, but for neither of them to get to 2025 is quite likely.
Regarding the statement "for neither of them to get 2025 is quite likely"... there are only two significant candidates, and 2025 is a simple majority of the total number of pledged + super delegates. One of them will get to 2025.
ReplyDeleteNeither of them can get to 2025 delegates with just pledged delegates alone. It's mathematically impossible.
No - not all elected delegates are pledged, and none of the superdelegates are formally pledged.
ReplyDeleteThe last I looked, there were more than 300 superdelegates who'd not expressed a preference.
At this point, the margin between the two candidates is less than the number of unpledged superdelegates, and it will be nearly impossible for either candidate to win the remaining contests with enough of a margin to make that stop being true.
So it's up to the 300+ unpledged superdelegates. Whichever candidate they swing to will win, or if they continue to hold out we'll have a contested convention.
No disagreement that the superdelegates will determine the nomination. What you said is the flip side of my point that it's mathematically impossible for either candidate to win on pledged delegates alone.
ReplyDeleteThe question is, would the superdelegates dare defy the will of the voters, and nominate the candidate with fewer pledged delegates. This is one of the scenarios that could tear the Democratic Party apart.
Other "snatch defeat from the jaws of victory" scenarios that could guarantee McCain will be President would be insisting on seating the bogus FL and MI delegates, the Clinton campaign suing over the Texas Democratic caucus (as they are now threatening), and a further escalation of the attack politics that Clinton used recently to turn her poll numbers around.