Obama’s magic number to clinch the Democratic Presidential nomination is 180 per Democratic Convention Watch. Clinton’s is 327. There are 487 available delegates, with about 200 of those to be allocated through the remaining primaries.
The remaining primaries with some poll numbers of unknown reliability are:
West Virginia (28 delegates) – 5/13. Clinton +28.
Kentucky (51 delegates) – 5/20. Clinton +36.
Oregon (52 delegates) – 5/20. Obama +12.
Puerto Rico (55 delegates) – 6/1. ?
South Dakota (15 delegates) – 6/3. ?
Montana (24 delegates) – 6/3. ?
My back of the envelope calculations suggest that Clinton would have to get about 80% of the remaining superdelegates to win the nomination.
——
Oh, and Matt Tully, while jokingly chastising Indiana for its refusal to move on and give up the national spotlight last night shows his own failure to move on. In his case, he fails to move on from the tired story lines of the past few weeks.
The early morning storyline suggested Clinton had claimed Indiana, offsetting a decisive defeat in North Carolina. Although he won North Carolina, Obama’s apparent Indiana stumble again raises questions that have haunted him in recent weeks. Why does he struggle so much with white blue-collar voters? Has the controversy over his former pastor damaged a candidate who once seemed destined for the White House?
In what alternate universe is the crushing defeat suffered by Clinton in North Carolina “offset” by her 20,000 vote victory in Indiana? And, the “struggling with white, blue-collar voters” and “Obama’s ex-pastor hyperventilation” barely moved the meter in Indiana. It was tied going in and tied going out. Meanwhile, Obama won by 10 times that amount in North Carolina. Contrary to Mr. Tully’s passive voiced assertion that last night’s results raises questions; last night’s results, in fact, answered those questions. Now it’s time to look forward and raise questions about how much John McCain’s close association with President Bush and his policies bothers voters: white, blue-collar and otherwise.
Update
Kos has posted the text of a memo from the Obama campaign to remaining superdelegates. Basically it advises them that Clinton’s path to the nomination is increasingly unlikely.
With the Clinton path to the nomination getting even narrower, we expect new and wildly creative scenarios to emerge in the coming days. While those scenarios may be entertaining, they are not legitimate and will not be considered legitimate by this campaign or its millions of supporters, volunteers, and donors.
We believe it is exceedingly unlikely Senator Clinton will overtake our lead in the popular vote and in fact lost ground on that measure last night. However, the popular vote is a deeply flawed and illegitimate metric for deciding the nominee – since each campaign based their strategy on the acquisition of delegates. More importantly, the rules of the nomination are predicated on delegates, not popular vote.
Just as the Presidential election in November will be decided by the electoral college, not popular vote, the Democratic nomination is decided by delegates.
If we believed the popular vote was somehow the key measurement, we would have campaigned much more intensively in our home state of Illinois and in all the other populous states, in the pursuit of larger raw vote totals. But it is not the key measurement. We played by the rules, set by you, the DNC members, and campaigned as hard as we could, in as many places as we could, to acquire delegates. Essentially, the popular vote is not much better as a metric than basing the nominee on which candidate raised more money, has more volunteers, contacted more voters, or is taller.
Even if Clinton and Obama had won IN and NC by identical margins, the two victories would not have offset because NC had 43 more delegates than Indiana. I don’t exactly have high expectations for Tully, but how can a day on which Obama expanded his delegate lead and did better in both states than recent polls suggested be anything but a death blow to HRC’s campaign?
The good news is, Obama wins on all these, including the critical ‘height’ metric. And clearly, since height is a metric we can actually measure with the metric system, it’s the most important metric of all.
Yipes. Is it November yet?
I received a healthy splash of cold water yesterday as I went out to the polls. After months of reading the absolutely, embarrassingly poisonous bickering between the Clinton and Obama supporters (e.g. – “I’ll vote McCain if X gets the nod”), my Mother-in-Law gave me her perspective.
Because she doesn’t read blogs or watch talking head shows, she was blissfully unaware of the rancor; and when I asked her what she thought of the race, she said: “In my 44 years of voting, I now have the chance to elect either a black man or a woman for president. That was fantasy talk for most of my life. I’m just honored to have lived to see it.”
Big picture, gang. Big fricking picture.
Obama campaign gets snarky. I like that.
Is Obama still ahead by the “If all the contests were winner-take-all like the Republicans” metric?
And isn’t it about time for white, female voters of a certain age (Hillary’s main constituency) to get over themselves? I am tempted to say, “Go ahead and vote for McCain, and you’ll get the government you deserve”, except that I would have to live through it, too.
T-I will not tell my wife what you just said;-) Our votes canceled out each other yesterday. Although I think she would vote for Obama if he becomes the candidate.
So, I am soooo over — MATT TULLY. The guy is a nincompoop when it comes to story lines and frankly even his gauzy sweet stuff makes me gag. Mary Beth Schneider, Bill Ruthart and that new Dorothy ___ for the Star are REAL reporters who work and get a scoop. Tully fills space, and doesn’t even do that well.
I can’t tell you how heartwarming it’s been for a withered misanthrope to watch as millennial waves of fresh young Democrats adopted “old white woman” as a favored pejorative.
Quite a contrast to all those young bucks supporting Obama, I suppose.
Y’know, Doug, when I see that in your comments I’ll take issue with it, too.
I’m getting sick and tired of Hillary saying “working people”, as opposed to those with a college education, support her. I wonder what she thinks we college-educated people do with our time? In my mind, both subsets of people “work”. The difference is that those of us with college educations worked harder at bettering our employment prospects prior to entering the workforce (and many of us were in the workforce during college, also).
But in Hillary’s mind, it’s “you work, so you like me”, or “you went to college, so you like Obama.”
Thank you thank you thank you, T! If there is one phrase in today’s political lexicon that absolutely raises my hackles, it’s “working people”.
I’ve worked with my hands and back, and I’ve worked with my brain. To get to this work I do now with my brain required FAR more effort and far more time than getting to employ with my hands and back ever required of me.
From a USA Today article:
Give it up, lady.
And I thought the party was calling for a more unified front-don’t give the republicans any more ammo.
I also heard her say on the news last night that if the dems followed the same primary rules as the republicans, she’d already be the candidate.
Guess what…they DON’T!
Oddly enough, I adopt different strategies based on the game I’m playing. Sometimes, when playing Euchre, I joke about how something would make a great poker hand. But I don’t expect someone to take me seriously no matter how many queens I have in my hand.
Oh, Doug, you’re trying to make my head explode! Not just “working”, but now “hard-working”!
Now I’ll grant that my father, still loading furniture on trucks at age 70, is in a different category than I am. I actually don’t feel like I work all that hard with my fifty-hour work week, because it took a few years of 100-hour work weeks to get here. So it’s all pretty much gravy now, in comparison.
But granting at the outset that there are probably more than a few in Hillary’s “hard-working” subset who outwork us “eggheads” (Paul Begala terminology), we must also acknowledge that more than a few of those “hard workers” couldn’t be bothered to turn in homework assignments or put forth much of an effort when it could have changed their lot in life.
I’m generalizing. But my point is that all of our votes count. And yet she is assigning special value to the votes of one class of worker, and it’s pretty apparent that she does that only because that group supports her. Add on that she shameless panders to that group because she thinks they’re easily duped. She also adds the “white people” qualifier as another pander or coded phrase for a certain subset that supports her. When I hear phrases like “hard working”, “white people”, and “didn’t finish college” being grouped together and becoming a celebrated subset of people, it’s like a dog whistle blowing. If you’re under-educated and white, you work hard. If you’re trained your intellect, or are black, does that mean you’re lazy?
I don’t mean to put too fine a point on this. But in a memorable previous election, one candidate was just too smart to gain our nation’s trust. The other candidate’s embracing of a lifestyle devoid of intellectual curiousity was seen as a real strength. How’d that work out for us? I hope some of the electorate has seen the light. But not Hillary. She doesn’t want to cast her lot with economists, college-educated egghead types, or the like. Unless maybe if they’re white and in some other subset that votes for her.
The U.S. has a proud anti-intellectual tradition. So, while annoying, this isn’t new.
Haha, Doug:
I remember many a childhood schoolmate given into this conundrum. There was almost always a game played in schoolyard PE that one kid would not succeed in despite athletic prowess, so they would begin yelling: “If this game wasnt so dumb I would be winning!”
Clinton may well be the one yelling “Gin!” at the World Series of Poker.
I just figured eight years of Gee-Dubya might have been the cure for that illness. If that didn’t do it, maybe nothing will.
But it should be the Republicans who make the argument that intellectual eggheads and minorities are members of the fringe. A Democrat shouldn’t be making those arguments for them. That’s one job the Republicans shouldn’t be allowed to outsource.
If I could defend Hillary for a moment…
You know that the Democrats claim to represent the working man. Supposedly, that is what their policies are supposed to do.
So why shouldn’t Hillary take her strength with “the working man” and beat the everliving snot out of Barack with it?
And if Barack is winning the race with the more educated, well, what’s the deal with that? What is he offering that attracts the well educated and the well off?
Tax policy? Probably not, they’re going to have their taxes jacked up to Western European rates if Barack gets his way.
What else? Iraq? It isn’t like the educated are sending their sons and daughters to die in Iraq.
Energy policy? Barack doesn’t have one, and he’s no different than McCain and Clinton on that score. And the well off can afford these gas prices fairly easily.
So what does Barack offer other than the psychic satisfaction of voting for a black man (even one who isn’t African-American by any measure)?
Is psychic satisfaction enough to win a tough campaign? One where McCain peels off elderly whites and “the working class”?
Hillary seems like a safer bet to me.
One of my favorites recent characterizations was the national political pundits ponting out that Lake County Whites were different from Marion County Whites.And by extrapolative thinking we realize that Marion county and Lake county have the same kind of Blacks,because there is just one kind. ( may that be the erroneous basis of how Obama is perceived by many?)
Don’t get me wrong, I’ll take an Obama presidency before I’ll take 4 more years of the Clintons.
I just don’t get why you guys think Barack is better than Hillary. Or Democrats think that he is better.
Point of fact, Lou, there is a huge chasm between whites in Lake and Marion counties. Lake County whites are uneducated steelworkers. Whites in Marion are educated state employees.
Big difference.
Do YOU think that there’s a difference in an African American from Gary or one from Indy? If so, how? Exactly?
I don’t think that the pundit was wrong, nor racist. She’s a realist. And getting paid to give commentary. I think that she made a good point.
My oldest son has used that same logic–of course he’s SEVEN!
Re: Obama v. Clinton and who is the safe bet.
With Clinton, I think she’s either going to win by a tiny margin or lose by a tiny margin. Picking her is playing not to lose. With her, I expect we’d get incremental policy proposals that target certain constituencies. I suspect we’d have a narrow majority one way or the other in the Congress. I also suspect with Clinton in office, Republican party discipline would remain strong with few individual Republican members of Congress crossing party lines to join a policy proposal with which they agree.
With Obama, I think he’s likely to win big but has the potential to lose big. Picking him is playing to win. If he wins, I think he’ll do it in a way that expands the Democratic majority and marginalizes the Republicans to an extent that will have party members breaking ranks to occasionally join with Democrats on policy proposals they think are sound.
Regarding the Iraq war, a lot of thinking types thought it was a bad idea before it started. When we see Hillary ratcheting up the rhetoric against Iran (having also voted for the Iraq authorization), we see someone voting with her testicles rather than her brain. It tends to lose some of our votes.
Buzzcut,
I don’t doubt that Whites are even more nuanced than 2 types, all according to the culture they were raised in.That’s the same with Blacks,except it’s true that most Blacks still live in similarly poor neighborhoods.When was the Emancipation Proclamation? To see upscale Black neighborhoods one would have to have visited a big city. Chicago has very middle class Black neighborhoods, Pullman for example.But few know of any Black Chicago area except ‘the ghetto’ ( blame it on Elvis Presley’s ballad)
The city I was largely grew up in( Urbana,Il)is a university town,but has a Black section where nobody even wanted to drive through,and this was before the racial uprisings of the 60s.The movie theatres had de facto segregation at least through the 50s. I mistakenly sat once in the Black side of a movie theatre back when I was in grade school. There were no signs;everyone just sat where they were comfortable sitting,according to long traditions.This is not the South.Anyone my age ( 66)still remembers how it always used to be back then and that was reality.
We weren’t part of the university crowd although the U of I was there.We were the blue collar working class.My father was a high school drop out and was classified as ‘unskilled labor’ all through his working life, so he was always competing with Black men for jobs.This made race always an issue.
My mother ( now almost 90) is still petrified when she sees a Black man approaching..sounds like Obama’s grandma’s story.
I just hope with Obama we all can get some insights. The man absolutely must be able to see both sides with an unjaundiced eye,and he is good-willed and should understand race from both sides.And to think he has a chance to be president.
Public Education is still the missing link..Why can a much maligned socialist type government like France provide equal education to everyone and the USA cannot even have it as a goal? .But that’s another discussion,which always dead-ends in political partisan bickering.Give Obama a chance.
Maybe Obama can help us bridge the racial gap in some meaningful ways.Commucation is always so difficult. There are still deep-seated racial feelings, but I try to avoid using the term ‘racist’ because that misses the point and serves entrenched views.
The ratio of black/white race in Marion Co. and Lake Co. are similar [26:71 Lake, 26:70 Marion].
Per capita manufacturing output is a bit higher in Lake [Lake 27289: Marion 25550].
Per capita income is a bit higher in Marion: [Lake 21.7k : Marion 19.6k]
The percentage of adults with bachelors degrees or more is quite a lot higher in Marion [Lake 16.2% : Marion 25.4%]…there’s the big difference.
But note that neighboring Porter Co’s per capita income is $23.9k, with 22.6% of adults with bachelors, so resist the temptation to think of the difference as regional. Lake Co. is more urban and Porter more suburban.
[2006 census, my calculations, quickly done so possibly wrong]
Another notable difference is that Marion Co. does unigov, and Lake Co. does ‘gazillion-gov’ with a bewildering array of municipalities. The myriad local government units in Lake Co. certainly appears to (at least in part) reflect an institutionalized racial divide.
Hate replying to myself…it’s wrong somehow.
But I swapped the per capita incomes…should be Marion 21.7k, Lake 19.6k…but all you smart Masson’s Blog readers figured that out on your own, no doubt.
The myriad local government units in Lake Co. certainly appears to (at least in part) reflect an institutionalized racial divide.
Yes and no.
The large number of municipalities in Lake County are a historical artifact. Lake County is heavily urbanized, and developed at the turn of the century. Municipal organization reflects Indiana law at that time, which favored cities for urban areas, towns for suburban areas, and unincorporated rural areas.
None of this is racist. Hell, Gary was lilly white at the turn of the century.
But the opposition to unigov in Lake County today does have a racial component.
Myself, I just see that, because of population, Gary, East Chicago, and Hammond are going to naturally dominate any unigov. These areas are less than competantly represented at every level of government. Why would I want to be ruled by their incompetance?
To me, it is coincidental that these towns are largely minority populated. The fact that they’re corrupt and incompetant is what matters. I don’t want to have anything to do with them.
I have to admit that I know next to nothing about Indy’s unigov. Can anybody give me a link to a historical primer on how it developed? Maybe a book?
There’s a little bit of information about Unigov at Wikipedia.
Thanks Doug.
Man, that’s some complicated s*** right there. I can guarantee you that that is never coming to Lake County. It’s waaaaay too hard to get your head around.
Excluded cities? What the heck is that? Why?