Yesterday, Hillary Clinton scored a massive double digit victory over Barack Obama in the Pennsylvania primary!
Except she didn’t.
I’m not saying this because the spread between Clinton and Obama was actually 9.3% (which if I remember math class correctly rounds down to 9% instead of up to 10%).
Nor am I saying this because Pennsylvania was natural Clinton territory and even just a few months back Clinton was running 20 points above Obama:
That’s just trivia.
The real issue is in terms of the numbers game Clinton’s victory didn’t mean anything. Right now the U.S. Democratic presidential campaign is just that: a numbers game. The magic number is 2,024 – that’s the number of delegates needed to clinch the Democratic nomination. Barrack Obama has 1,719 delegates and Hillary Clinton has 1,586 delegates. So how did Clinton’s big surge change the numbers? She got net 12 delegates.
Twelve.
After all the hoopla, the media, the tens of millions of dollars spent she got only 12 net delegates from the primary. For comparison, the last state that voted was Kansas. I don’t remember hearing a lot about Kansas in the news. But Obama got net 14 delegates there. So basically if you take the two states that voted in April, Obama came out two delegates ahead.
That’s not an overwhelming victory for Obama. But look at the total delegate score above. Obama doesn’t need overwhelming victories anymore. Given that delegates are allocated proportionally Clinton is not going to be able to make up that ground.
But what about superdelegates? What about that slew of elected Democratic politicians and party apparatchiks that make up about a fifth of the votes in the convention at Denver? Can’t Clinton use them to win the nomination? Well, right now there are only 259 uncommitted superdelegates. That means that if the uncommitted superdelegates go 3-to-1 for Clinton she’s still losing. Okay, but what if Hillary wins 3-to-1 and maybe peels off some of Obama’s current superdelegats? It’s just as unrealistic as her winning through the states. Here’s a chart from blogger and chef Ezra Klein that shows the movement of superdelegates for Obama and Clinton:
So to wrap it up, Obama has won more states and more votes and it is realistically impossible for Clinton to win the nomination. I should mention though, that some disagree: