UPDATE with GRAPH: Obama 53%, Clinton 47% with 82% reporting
Mon Mar 31, 2008 at 02:16:46 PM PDT
So, there's been a lot of talk about the race being "super close", since Obama only leads Clinton by 124 delegates. I've read countless comments in online forums where Clinton supporters proclaim that Hillary is only 2% behind and that the race is wide-open. Well, it's not--for two reasons.
First, super-delegates are included in that tally, and they're not going to nominate the loser, as nearly every party leader has stated.
Second, since the race is almost over and there aren't that many delegates outstanding, the lead is considerably more daunting than it would have been a month ago when there were many more delegates up for grabs. If you're 100 delegates behind with 90 percent of the vote remaining you're not as disadvantaged as if you're 100 delegates behind with 5 percent of the vote remaining. The following graph illustrates the exponential increase in the margin of victory needed to overcome a lead as the amount of votes outstanding decreases.
So, for illustration, consider if the race were being projected like on election night, where each candidate is given a percentage of the vote with a certain percent of precincts reporting. In this scenario, Obama has 1408 delegates and Clinton has 1251 with a total of 3250 delegates up for grabs. This is the equivalent of Obama having 53 percent of the vote to Clinton's 47 percent with 82 percent of precincts reporting.
That's a huge lead; in fact, if this were election night, all the networks would be projecting Obama as the winner, because for Clinton to overcome that 6 percent lead with only 18 percent of the vote outstanding, she'd have to receive a whopping 27 percent margin in the last 18 percent. She's only achieved a margin that size once--in Arkansas.
(An aside: I'm not sure where this 2 percent number comes from but I suspect it's based on delegates that haven't been allocated yet--in upcoming primary states. This isn't how the networks calculate a lead on election night. UPDATE: Commenters seem to think the 2% figure is the popular vote margin including Florida. So, in other words, the 2% figure is doubly inane.)
UPDATE: Florida and Michigan re-vote plans would have minimal impact. Commenter SheaG Notes:
So the latest proposal for MI and FL is to seat the FL delegation giving each candidate 50/50, but they only count as half a delegate. There are 186 delegates in FL, so that would give them each 46.5 delegates.
Now there's MI. If using the latest proposed plan, Barack would get 36 delegates and Hillary would get 47, and the remaining 73 would be split by the popular vote after the last primary is completed. So let's say just for kicks, those get divided evenly. That gives Hillary a total of 84 out of MI (we'll round up for her), and Barack gets 72.
Under that plan, Barack gets 118 and Hillary gets 131, so she nets 13.
Now an author on Free Republic states that the total number of delegates in those two states is not the 342 total that I get above (before dividing FL by two), but 366. Who knows why. But let's give her a 55/45 split there as the author proposes, which means the delegates should split roughly 201/165, a difference of 36.
Now let's back to the diarist's totals. Obama has 1408 delegates and Clinton has 1251 with a total of 3250 delegates up for grabs, not including MI and FL. If you add in the first scenario for FL and MI as outlined above, that gives Obama 1526 and Hillary 1382 with 3499 total delegates. So that's Obama 52.47% to Clinton's 47.53% with 83% of the votes counted.
Well, OK, all that hoopla and it changed things NOT AT ALL, so let's go to the second scenario which is the best possible Hillary could ever hope for, just giving her 55/45. That gives Obama 1573 delegates and Clinton has 1452 with a total of 3616 delegates up for grabs. This is the equivalent of Obama having 52 percent of the vote to Clinton's 48 percent with 84% percent of precincts reporting.
