Wednesday, February 13, 2008

Of Insurmountable Leads

Josh asks:
[T]he gist of it was that both sides agree that it's highly unlikely that
Clinton can end up with more pledged delegates than Barack Obama. And the issue
now is how close she can keep the margin. If she can keep it within a couple
dozen delegates, he argued, it would be credible to try to make up the margin
with super delegates....Folks paying close attention are as likely to accurately
predict the outcomes as the folks in the campaign. So is this true? Is a pledged
delegate win for Clinton no longer a realistic possibility?
Now, sometimes I make mistakes. We all do. On Monday afternoon, I wrote:
The race for pledged delegates is effectively over, and Obama has won. Now,
they're only fighting over the margin of victory. They'll also squabble about
the legitimacy of caucuses. I give the national media until Wednesday before
these become the new story lines.

Looks like Fineman figured it out with 45 minutes left in Tuesday - I give him tons of credit.

The short answer is yes, Obama's lead in pledged delegates is now effectively insurmountable. One reason this very plain fact has been obscured is the way that networks have been counting pledged delegates - with a surfeit of caution, so that they won't have to retract their counts. Most years, that makes a lot of sense. This year, it's had the perverse effect of distorting the picture; we know within a few delegates what Obama's actual lead must be, but because we can't pin it down precisely in a bunch of states, the networks haven't been citing it. CBS, the best of the bunch, puts the current pledged delegate lead at 142, but that's a little high. (My best guess is that he'll emerge from tonight with a lead of around 44 more than he had, so his campaign will likely claim a lead of about 131).

Looking ahead at the remaining contests, we find that there are 1,075 pledged delegates yet to be awarded. To tie Obama, Hillary would have to win about 603 of them, or roughly 56%. But her task is actually a little steeper than that - current polls show her trailing in Hawaii, Wisconsin, and North Carolina. Let's award those states to Obama by a modest 55-45 margin, less than the polls predict. Now there are just 866 delegates up for grabs, Obama's lead is up to 152, and Hillary has to win 59% of the remaining delegates to tie him. But it's worse than it sounds. Even winning 60% of the popular vote the rest of the way won't do the trick, because of Obama's strength in majority-black districts. To win 59% of the delegates, she's got to take every state but the three named above (NC, HI, WI) by an average margin of better than 60-40. That includes contests like Texas, with its hybrid caucus-primary, and also states like Mississippi, Oregon, South Dakota and Wyoming. Can this happen? Not bloody likely. She'll be lucky, frankly, to win more than a few states outright - the remaining calendar is not terribly favorable.

In that way, I think Fineman is underestimating the challenge she faces. It would take a comeback of truly epic proportions, and monumental routs in Ohio, Texas, and Pennsylvania, among other states, just to pull Hillary within a few dozen delegates. She'd have to start winning by Obama-like margins. But is there any reason to believe Obama won't take most of Mississippi's 33? Or that, having won every single county in neighboring Washington, he won't win in Oregon? The pledged delegate lead isn't going away, and it's going to be substantial - at least 50, and that's if everything starts to break Hillary's way.

That brings us to legitimacy. There's another argument Hillary's been deploying, to sway superdelegates to her side - she likes to say that she's ahead in the popular vote. On the afternoon following Super Tuesday, Hillary's popular vote lead in those contests stood at some 58,000 votes. In the two primaries held before then, Obama's net margin was 146,000. In five contests held since then, he's accumulated 619,000 more votes than Clinton. (I'm excluding caucuses in ME, NV, and IA, which would only add to Obama's margin.) So, overall, Obama now leads by some 707,000 popular votes. Clinton had been boasting about her popular vote lead by counting the two primaries that no one else does: in Michigan, she racked up 328,000 votes; in Florida, 288,000 more than her rival. The remarkable thing is that, after tonight, even that count falls short of Obama's total, and it's a lead she's not likely to regain.

So what's left? Well, there's her fraigle lead among the superdelegates. But even some prominent Hillary endorsers have, over the past week, indicated that they won't vote against a clear-cut lead in pledged delegates.Elaine Kamarck is the most prominent of the bunch; she made headlines by opining that superdelegates are, essentially, cowards, and will follow the will of the people. So Hillary's much-vaunted lead among the supers turns out to be contingent on her maintaining a lead or a very tight race among the pledged delegates - without that, she starts losing even the superdelegates she already has.

Let me add to that my suspicion that we're going to see a steady drumbeat of superdelegate endorsements for Obama between now and the March 4 primaries. As I've written before, the Obama campaign likes to deploy its endorsements strategically. Most of those we've seen over the past week have been clustered in the states due up next on the calendar. The Obama campaign has claimed to have 170 endorsements lined up, but no one else can count that high - a sign that he's been stockpiling again. Rolling out the endorsements now will add to his aura of inevitability, and help drive the news cycle during the weeks without elections. Hillary's lead here currently stands at roughly 90, but as supers wake up to the new math, she's unlikely to be able to persuade too many fence-sitters to cast their lot with her. Plus, every time Obama wins a state by a huge margin, the supers residing in that state feel substantial pressure to endorse.

A final thought on those supers. There are only between 300-350 left to endorse a candidate, depending on whose count you're using (the other 76 are UADs). If Hillary trails by at least 50 pledged delegates, and probably by 12-20 UADs, she'll have to win the votes of 150-175 of the remaining supers. Does anyone think she can do that?

So is it all over? Not quite. Here are three ways Hillary could pull this out:
1) Seat Michigan and Florida at the convention, or push for new caucuses in those states and win them really, really big.
2) Win on March 4 by such stunning margins that the Obama campaign crumples.
3) Persuade almost all the remaining superdelegates to endorse her.

If you find any of those scenarios even vaguely plausible, then you've got yourself a race. But if you're not persuaded, don't expect the remaining superdelegates to be, either. After March 4, when the last bit of uncertainty has been removed, look for the superdelegates to coalesce behind the presumptive nominee and end this thing.

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