If you have been paying attention to the coverage this past week of Bernie Sanders and his chance of winning a majority of the pledged delegates, what you have heard over and over again is that Sanders needs something like 57% the remaining delegates to win.
That number seems large but not insurmountable. The real problem is not the size of the win, but the assumption that every remaining state and territory will have a uniform outcome, which is ridiculous. There are 1747 delegates left with Secretary Clinton having a lead of about 228 delegates. Playing out the states that are left point to serious problems for Sanders.
In our estimation, nine remaining contests worth 799 delegates clearly favor Clinton (New York, Delaware, Maryland, Pennsylvania, the Virgin Islands, Puerto Rico, New Mexico, New Jersey, and the District of Columbia.) Assuming the most favorable possibilities for Sanders, he could perhaps reach a tie in the delegate total from these states. Frankly, that seems farfetched but let’s assume it anyway. That means Sanders is still down 228 delegates with only 948 delegates remaining.
Six states left on the calendar would seem to favor Sanders (Wisconsin, Wyoming, Oregon, Montana, North Dakota, and South Dakota). They have a combined 220 delegates and begin voting on April 5 with the Wisconsin primary. Sanders needs about 70% of these delegates overall to win. Sanders has reached these numbers in caucuses but only Vermont has been in this neighborhood in primaries. Two of these states are caucuses and will very likely be strong for Sanders. Even assuming that Sanders gets to 70% in these contests, either in all of them, or in aggregate, it only gets him 88 delegates, leaving a gap of about 140.
The remaining seven contests account for the last 728 delegates (Connecticut, Rhode Island, Indiana, Guam, West Virginia, Kentucky and California.) At the moment, polling suggests the best Sanders can do is tie. To win, Sanders still needs roughly 60% of these delegates, which is a huge challenge.
California is one of these states. A win there is possible but to get up to 60% is highly unlikely. Today’s Los Angeles Times poll puts Sanders down eight in California. There is just nothing in the results so far, including last week’s Clinton win in Arizona, to make it seem remotely possible that Sanders can win California by 20%.
Of course it is easier to just say Sanders needs 57% of the remaining delegates, but when you actually take a look into what that would require it becomes nearly impossible.
The Scorecard
The Scorecard is a political strategy and analysis blog. Our hope is to provide information and insight that can be found nowhere else into how and why things are happening in American politics. Unlike many political pundits, we will tell you who we think is going to win as an election approaches; we will tell you why; and we will give you a sense of our level of confidence. Ours is a holistic approach, one that takes in as many numbers as possible but is also willing to look past the numbers if need be. When we turn out to have been wrong, we will let you know. When we are right, we’ll let you know that too.
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About Me
Author Jason Paul is a longtime political operative who got his start as an intern in 2002. He has been a political forecaster for almost as long. He won the 2006 Swing State Project election prediction contest and has won two other local contests. He had the pulse of Obama-Clinton race in 2008 and has been as good as anyone at delegate math in the 2016 race. He looks forwards to providing quality coverage for the remainder of the 2016 race.
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