The conventional wisdom -- here and in the broader media -- is that the 2008 Democratic Presidential nomination will be sewed up by someone after the 2/5/2008 Super-Duper Tuesday primaries.
And why not? More than half the delegates will have been selected by then, and in previous years, 2004 in particular, the eventual nominee was rolling downhill well before that many delegates had been pledged.
I'm not so sure, and I've crunched some numbers. Join me for a down-in-the-weeds political mathfest after the fold . . .
By sometime around 3 AM EST on February 6, 2008, almost 2,250 delegates to the Democratic National Convention will have been selected in caucuses and primaries, out of a total of 4,367 (3,515 pledged and 852 unpledged, or "super-delegates"). Of those pledged delegates, 291 are so-called "PLEOs" -- party leaders and elected officials who are not super-delegates -- and the rest are chosen via various proportional weighting systems.
You can find out how many delegates and of what types each state gets on the interactive map at the bottom of this page: http://www.demconvention.com/...
So, if history is any guide, with over half the delegates chosen, one candidate should be well on their way to sewing up the prize, right?
I'm not at all sure, no. The polls in each state generally favor Sen. Clinton, but they are fluid and none of her leads are commanding. The other two major contenders (and in some of the places, minor ones) have blocs big enough to be more than competitive and, more important, to threshhold for delegates.
In this excellent Bowers post on MyDD, Chris shows the state-by-state numbers for each of the early caucus/primary states (where available), and the national poll number for the presumably unpolled Super-Duper Tuesday states. He says, and I agree:
. . . [I]t is fun to speculate on possible scenarios based on the current state of the race. I would love to receive solid tracking polls in all of these states, so that at any given moment it was possible to make something approximating an accurate forecast of who currently is favored to win the nomination. Lacking that, speculation and crude estimations might be all we have.
So much fun, in fact, that I AM speculating.
I took these numbers, and matched them up against the available delegates in each of thse states to get a sense of where the candidates would stand after SDT, if their relative support held through the period (not by any means certain, of course).
I assumed in this calculation that by SDT, many of the second/third tier candidates would have left, that there wouldn't be any undecideds left. To do so, I allocated the "other/undecided" percentage to the three top candidates proportional to their existing support (which would give Clinton 45.7%, Obama 32.7% and Edwards 21.6%).
Yes, I know, this is crude, and real life will no doubt intrude on this model, but here's where the model leaves us in terms of pledged delegates on February 6:
Clinton 959
Obama 681
Edwards 464
Other 136
If you then assume that among super-delegates, Clinton would have 60%, and Obama and Edwards each 20% (not unreasonable, as the supers are the ultimate party insiders), our delegate totals are:
Clinton 1,470
Obama 951
Edwards 634
Other 136
No runaway here, and the process will continue in full well into the primary schedule, perhaps leading to . . . a brokered convention.
I have no dog in the Presidential hunt at this point, so I won't even begin to speculate who is helped by a brokered convention. But I have to admit that the Dennis-the-Menace anarchist in me (no, I don't mean Kucinich) is thrilled by the idea. No boring, scripted four-day television commercial, but a real blood-and-guts convention would be just plain fun, as far as I'm concerned.
How do you feel?