We called this race a little over a
month ago, and despite Sanders’ recent good run, the math has not changed
anywhere near enough to justify a re-examination of the nomination fight. It’s
true that Sanders hot streak, while expected, has been slightly better than we
anticipated. However we are now close enough to the goal line to examine the
question of when Hillary Clinton will clinch the majority of delegates needed
to win and whether she can do that before all voting ends.
Currently Hillary Clinton is roughly 600 delegates away from
clinching the majority she needs for the nomination. We have done a rough
estimate for the states and territories that vote before June 7th, and
we see the Clinton campaign picking up roughly 500 delegates from these
contests putting her about a 100 shy as of June 5th. There are still
198 undecided unpledged delegates, and thus if the Clinton campaign can either
pick up or announce about half of them she could in theory clinch a majority of
delegates before California. This will be close. It is entirely possible that the
Clinton campaign will have this in hand but not announce so as not to insult
voters in the last seven contests. But June
5 is our best guess as to when Clinton will have a majority of delegates in
hand. We also note the absurdity of shifting the standard from winning a
majority of the pledged delegates to winning a majority of the convention only
with pledged delegates. 15% of the all delegates are unpledged super delegates.
So it is just ridiculous to move the goal posts to require nearly 59% of
pledged delegate as the only way for convention to not be “open” or “contested.”
Democratic proportionality rules mean
that a 10 to 15% race can go the distance, but that does not mean the result is
something that is genuinely contestable. We clearly have enough data from that
states that have voted to know the end of this story. Clinton will likely win by about 300 pledged
delegates with the better guess at more rather than less. When all the voting
stops on June 14th the nominee will be overwhelmingly clear. It is
possible that unpledged delegates will put her over the top, a week before
that. We will be tracking the number of delegates Clinton
needs to Clinch as a category in each post from now on. New York in 10 days.
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.
0 comments:
Post a Comment