Given all the talk lately of new metrics by which to judge who is winning the Democratic nominating contest I decided to sit down and try and decide just what a win is in the upcoming Pennsylvania primary. We've all seen these, the popular vote total, large/important states won, the electoral value of states won, primary delegates vs. caucus delegates, yadda yadda. And to me these are all excellent ideas, with the exception of the large/important state metric, for 2012. But here and now in 2008 we are in a delegate race. So what would be a win for Senator Obama and what would be a win for Senator Clinton?
If you check the current numbers at http://demconwatch.blogspot.com, my favorite delegate tracker, you see that you need 2023.5 delegates to win the nomination. As of right now Senator Obama has 1636 delegates and Senator Clinton has 1499 delegates. There are 893 delegates remaining to be selected and Pennsylvania represents 158 delegates. As things stand today Senator Obama needs 43.4% of the remaining delegates to win and Senator Clinton needs 58.7% of the remaining delegates.
According to the Obama campaign spreadsheet that got leaked to Bloomberg a few months ago, which has been remarkably accurate thus far, the Obama campaign expects Pennsylvania will award 83 delegates to Senator Clinton and 75 delegates to Senator Obama, a delegate gain of +8 for Senator Clinton. But Pennsylvania represents 18% of the remaining available delegates so what does this do to the percentage of remaining delegates each side needs to win? Well a +8 split for Senator Clinton means that Senator Obama would now only need 42.5% of the remaining delegates to win and Senator Clinton would need 60.1% of the remaining delegates. Yes, that's right, if Senator Obama looses Pennsylvania by 8 delegates he is in a better position to win and Senator Clinton is worse off.
That begs the question, how many delegates could Senator Obama loose by before the math actually starts to look worse for him? He'd have to loose by a 90-68 delegate split, a +22 delegate gain for Senator Clinton. This would mean that Senator Obama would need 43.5% of the remaining delegates post-Pennsylvania to win the nomination and Senator Clinton would need 59.1% of the remaining delegates. Wait, look at that. Even with a +22 delegate gain Senator Clinton is still worse off in terms of percentage of remaining delegates to secure the nomination. In order to actually win on April 22nd Senator Clinton would need a 94/64 split, or a +30 delegate gain. That would put the delegate percentages at 44.0% for Senator Obama and 58.6% for Senator Clinton.
So there you have it, in order to win by a measure that truly matters on April 22nd Senator Clinton will need to net +30 delegates in Pennsylvania. Any loss of less then +22 delegates for Senator Clinton actually puts Senator Obama in a better position to secure the necessary delegates to win the nomination. Obviously the Clinton campaign will paint any win as a huge loss to Senator Obama, we know that for certain. And if she were to get a pickup of 15-20 delegates I'd start to worry about the popular vote split. While the nomination is not decided by the popular vote I do believe it is a psychological metric that would work in her favor. But anyway, there you have it. In my book anything less then a 22 delegate win for Senator Clinton is actually a win for Senator Obama by the delegate count, the only metric that actually matters.