Dem delegate math

After getting schlacked in the Potomac primaries, the media take on the Clinton campaign is that it's in a freefall. The media always overdoes things, just like they overdid the McCain collapse this summer. I knew McCain's campaign would do better and the media would swing back the opposite direction, but I was dead wrong in my thinking that McCain couldn't win the nomination. So caution is necessary in assessing the state of the race on the Democratic side.

But first, I am just exuberant at how the primaries have gone so far. All these states that moved up their primaries to gain influence have now been passed by, and we now have Ohio as the state that will decide the Presidential race, twice--first in the Democratic primary, and then in the general election. This being the Democrats' year, the primary is probably the most important. Fred Barnes has opined, in direct contradiction to this blog, that McCain might be well-positioned to pull out a victory. Read the op-ed just to see how his reasoning in fact leaves the opposite impression, inasmuch as it points out all the hurdles that have to be overcome for this to happen. Of course, McCain had a lot of hurdles to get the nomination in the first place, and that happened, and anything's possible, so November's election might be very close. But to my mind it's still the Democrats' year.

O.K., Hillary. She's smarting from the Potomac primaries. New York Mag:

[N]o amount of pre-spinning could soften the blow of losing a trio of contests by 23, 29, and 51 points (in Maryland, Virginia, and D.C., respectively) — especially coming on the back of a weekend in which Obama had soundly thrashed Clinton in four states plus the U.S. Virgin Islands. Even more distressing for Clinton's side were the signs that Obama had eaten into her bedrock of support. That he’d beaten her among white voters and folks earning less than $50,000 a year in Virginia. That he’d done the same among union households and white Catholics in Maryland.

She might be down but certainly not out. She leads in OH, PA, and TX, which have 64% of the remaining delegates she needs, as Mark Penn has pointed out. Speaking of Penn, Margaret Carlson writes this:

Everyone has been waiting for a shake-up of the Clinton team, but that would mean getting rid of her security blanket, Mark Penn, a major reason the campaign has burned through most of the money raised. Against all evidence that the populace already knew Clinton had a steel-trap brain and needed to be shown she had a heart, Penn insisted on an Iron Lady strategy of numbing recitations of memorized facts. When it failed, titular campaign manager Patti Solis Doyle and her deputy were sacrificed.

Furthermore, that reference-point of the election blogosphere, Jay Cost, has given a fascinating analysis over at RealClearPolitics. He writes:

In the South, there is a racial divide. Clinton wins white voters. Obama wins African American voters. When African Americans make up a strong share of the vote (e.g. Alabama, Georgia, Louisiana, and South Carolina), he wins. When they do not make up a strong share (e.g. Oklahoma and Tennesse), she wins. In the non-South, matters are more complicated. African Americans still go heavily for Obama - but whites are split. White men prefer Obama, white women prefer Clinton.

His conclusion: "[C]aucus states, states with high white median income, and 'homogeneously white' states all tend to support Obama." Regarding the Potomac primaries: "Given the voting coalitions that have formed over the last month and a half, Clinton never really stood a chance in any of them."

So it's not necessarily the case that Obama has "the Big Mo'." Cost again: "Clinton's losses in the contests are as explicable as any of her losses before or on Super Tuesday. Obama has systematically won states that play to his particular strengths since the Iowa caucus. So has Clinton. Her problem has been that she has not had any good states in the last week."

The race as it stands is Obama 1275, Clinton 1220. The magic number is 2025, and neither candidate is likely to get there, resulting in the 796 superdelegates deciding who is going to prevail. That's why it was front-page news in the NYTimes when Rep. John Lewis switched to Obama.

Michael Barone crunched the numbers, and here's his take on what's to come:

The results are as follows: a 44-30 delegate edge in Wisconsin, an 83-58 delegate edge in Ohio, and an 82-41 delegate edge in Texas. Overall this is an 80-delegate advantage, based (again I emphasize) on optimistic assumptions.

This would be enough to erase the current 58-delegate edge Obama has in total delegates according to Real Clear Politics. But not enough to overcome the 137-delegate edge he has among "pledged delegates," that is, those chosen in caucuses and primaries. And it doesn't account for the fact that Texas on March 4 will also have caucuses to select another 67 delegates. The Obama campaign has swamped the Clinton campaign in almost all the caucuses and probably has far more in the way of organization in Texas's 254 counties than the Clinton campaign does.

My bottom line take: The turf looks fairly favorable to Clinton, provided she wins Ohio and Texas March 4. Not favorable enough, perhaps, for her to overtake Obama in "pledged" delegates, but enough to keep the overall delegate count excruciatingly close, unless the superdelegates start cascading to Obama. (Maybe they have: Congressman John Lewis has evidently switched.) But if Clinton loses either Ohio or Texas, that's a sign that the ground thereafter will be less favorable to her. Losing Ohio would suggest she can't carry Pennsylvania or Indiana. Losing Texas suggests she can't carry Mississippi, North Carolina, West Virginia, or Kentucky. Losing either probably means the superdelegate cascade starts in torrents, and she falls well behind in total delegate count. In which case her candidacy is probably effectively over. And even if she wins Ohio and Texas, she's still not likely, I think (no, I haven't done the delegate arithmetic yet), to accumulate enough "pledged" delegates to win without an edge in superdelegates, and perhaps without getting the Florida and, more problematically, Michigan delegations seated. But I certainly don't see her quitting in these circumstances.