As the nomination race stands today, Barack Obama leads Hillary Clinton by approximately 159 pledged delegates with about 993 pledged delegates (PD) remaining to be allocated in the contests yet to be held.
From that, one can calculate that in order to gain a PD lead, Clinton would need to outperform Obama by 16% (in PD tallies) the rest of the way.
On March 4th, 370 pledged delegates are at stake. That leaves 623 PDs for the contests to be held after March 4th.
If we distribute PDs from each state holding a contest on March 4th in proportion to the current poll standings from that state, Clinton would net 8 more PDs than Obama in the aggregate on that day. However, she'd then need to win 24% of the PDs remaining thereafter, to end up with a lead in the pledged delegate tally. A tall order given that Obama has run a strong campaign thus far and that his polls are trending upwards.
It's a fair expectation that super delegates would not overturn the democratic will of the voters as reflected in pledged delegate tallies. Therefore, unless Hillary Clinton can win March 4th states by a substantial net margin in the range of 15-20%, she would not have a reasonable case (in this author's opinion) for proceeding with the nomination contest beyond that day.
Using FleetAdmiralJ's superb "Primary Results" spreadsheet as a base, I've prepared this derived spreadsheet. Here is a snapshot of the results from the spreadsheet:
Methodology, assumptions and analysis follow.
- We get the current PD standings from the "All States" sheet of the spreadsheet (which is left unaltered from FleetAdmiralJ's spreadsheet.)
- The current tally gives a 159 PD lead for Obama (cell D8 = row 8, column D).
- With 933 PDs remaining unallocated, in order take the lead in PDs, HRC would need to win 160 PDs more than Obama, the rest of the way, i.e. a PD margin of 16.07% (cell D10).
- In order to explore how things could look like after March 4th, as a scenario, we make estimated calculations in the "March 4th Calculations" section (rectangle A11:H25, i.e the rectangle defined by taking cells A11 and H25 as its top-left and bottom-right corners).
- In order to perform our calculations, we can use the current poll standings from Real Clear Politics: RCP polling averages for Ohio and Texas, the latest (Rasmussen) poll for Rhode Island (ignoring the 2/9-2/10 Brown University poll as that is somewhat dated) and the only currently available (Rasmussen) poll for Vermont. These poll numbers are found in the rectangle D14:E17.
- As a rough ball-park estimate for delegate allocation in each state, we distribute pledged delegates from that state proportional to the poll standings as in (5) above. For example, the current OH polling averages are HRC (49.6%) and Obama (41.6%) which break down OH's 141 pledged delegates into 64 PDs for Obama and 77 for HRC. After we do the apportionment for each state in this manner (rectangle G14:H17), we tally the resulting PDs to arrive at PD estimates as they might stand after March 4th.
- Those estimates (rectangle A20:D25) tell us that HRC would need to win 24% more delegates than Obama after March 4th (under the scenario and estimations as above), in order to take the lead among pledged delegates (counting only and all contested states.)
- The scenario above uses current poll standings which are, of course, likely to change in the coming days. At least currently, Obama enjoys a substantial momentum in these polls and his organization on the ground could (judging from earlier contests) be stronger than Clinton's.
- Needless to say, actual delegate allocation is going to be more complicated than the proportional distribution that we have used here, but our ball park estimation should not be too far off the mark.