Home Run In A Basketball Game

The spin from the Democratic nomination really is dizzying, and I'm glad I'm on a temporary semi-vacation and not watching it. Apparently there's a lot of renewed interest in the popular vote, with the Clinton campaign claiming their candidate is ahead (of course, to do that, they have to include Michigan, where Obama wasn't on the ballot, and exclude four caucus states which didn't release popular vote totals, three of which Obama won).

Which means that in Clinton and Jerome's world, Clinton is ahead in the popular vote only IF you exclude four caucus states, IF you include two unsanctioned states, and IF you "disenfranchise" every voter in Michigan who voted against Hillary Clinton.

That takes a new and particularly audacious level of chutzpah.

It takes a new level of chutzpah, considering that the popular vote, for the purposes of this nomination fight, doesn't mean anything. The nomination is decided by delegate counts. The delegates who attend Denver will not pledge the popular vote of their state but the delegates. And on the pledged delegate front, that ship has sailed.

Turning to the delegate math, if Clinton nets approximately 16 delegates out of Pennsylvania, she'll trail in the pledged battle by 150 delegates. With just 408 pledged delegates remaining, that means she'd need 68% of all pledged delegates left to overtake Obama. Now, if Obama and Clinton simply split the 187 delegates up for grabs on May 6 basically down the middle (which would be a rosy projection in Clinton's favor) and Obama's pledged delegate lead simply stayed at 150 and didn’t grow to 160 (the most likely outcome in two weeks), Clinton would need to win 85% of the then 221 remaining delegates up for grabs. 85%! As we mentioned on air last night, the battle for pledged delegates is over, Obama will win that metric and win it by some 100+ delegates.

And Clinton, by the way, is more likely to net 8-11 delegates from PA, if you look at the numbers.

That doesn't mean the race is over; but it does mean that the superdelegates would have to overturn the pledged delegates in order for Clinton to win. She might as well come out and say that. This popular vote thing is stupid. It's like saying, "I actually won that basketball game because you're not counting the two-run home run I hit." The popular vote doesn't play into the rules as decided on and agreed to by all parties before the primaries.

And for those who consider the weighting of delegates based on turnout in prior years in the states to be disenfranchising, it actually highlights the areas that a candidate needs to win in order to win a state. If you're the nominee and you win all over the place in Pennsylvania except for Philadelphia, where Democrats turn out, that's significant information. If you win all over California except Los Angeles and the Bay Area, that's notable. I don't buy the argument that losing a primary suggests that you can't win the general election, but if there's any metric that makes sense out of that, it's that the candidate who gains the most support in areas of Democratic strength will have an easier time of it in the general. And based on that, Obama is outperforming his numbers, given that he wins more delegates because he does well in high-turnout Democratic areas.

But again, that's not a metric that can credibly be used. The metric is delegates. Anything else is simply immaterial.