New York seems to have gotten the Sanders campaign to at
least acknowledge the reality of its situation. If you just read the headline,
you will likely miss the signs but if you read the subtext, they are very much there.
For over a month, the Sanders campaign has said that part of its plan would be
to persuade super delegates to switch to its side. After Hillary Clinton extended
her delegate lead to 237 pledged delegates with her New York win, Sanders
seemed to back off his play for super delegates. The Sanders campaign sent an
email very tellingly saying it intends to win the pledged delegates. A direct
quote from the e-mail: “We still have a path to the nomination, and our plan is to win the
pledged delegates in this primary.”
Of course, while it is fine to make such a statement, the goal is not in fact
achievable. New York illustrates that reality. It is the second largest
delegate prize on the Democratic side. Hillary Clinton won it by 16 points, and she netted 31 delegates. To
makeup a 237-delegates gap, Sanders would need more than seven-and-a-half New
York-sized wins in the remaining states to catch up. The polling from the
states that vote this week show just how difficult the challenge is. While
upsets in Rhode Island and Connecticut cannot be ruled out, Pennsylvania,
Maryland and Delaware look even more out of reach than Illinois. Regardless,
wins don’t do any good if they are not New York-size; Sanders has had exactly
two New York-sized wins in primaries, New Hampshire and Vermont.
It probably will take only a week
to make the math go from ridiculous to beyond ridiculous. Yet, even that will not
end the race. For the millions of people who voted for Sanders and the millions
more who want to, it is perfectly reasonable for him to run until the end of
voting. But at that point pretending that super delegates will save his
campaign won’t be seen as reasonable by anyone. Super delegates are
overwhelmingly for Clinton. With the pledged delegates and total votes echoing
those sentiments, there is nothing to even hint that the super delegates will flip.
(Only one of more than 400 super delegates who have pledged to Clinton have switched to Sanders.) There are only
714 unpledged delegates. Being exceptionally generous to Sanders and assuming he
can close within 200 pledged delegates would still require that Sanders get 64%
of super delegates.
There will be no reasonable way
to contest the convention even if the Sanders campaign insists it wants to. The
Sanders campaign will run through all the states because there is no real reason
not to. But all the talk about paths to victory should be silenced. It can be hard to hear but there is nothing
open about this convention.
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.
Our Delegate Math
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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