Since we won't have another results thread until next week, I thought I would appease the masses by having a graph filled post filled with statistics about where the race stands.
Just a few notes to start:
Delegate and popular vote counts are from The Green Papers, while my superdelegate list is from the awesome 2008 Democratic Convention Watch website.
First, let's start off with the pledged delegate count:
Pledged Delegates
As you can see, Obama leads with 1490 (45.8%) of pledged delegates, while Clinton has 1,337 (41.1%) and Edwards still has his 18 (0.6%) with 408 (12.5%) yet to be allocated (a full 46% of which will be awarded next Tuesday when Indiana and North Carolina vote).
While a margin of 153 out of 3,253 (4.7%) doesn't sound like a huge margin, one has to consider two things:
a) The fact that there are only 408 pledged delegates left - meaning that Clinton would have to win 69% of all remaining pledged delegates to win the pledged delegate count, and
b) The way the delegate system works, it is very unlikely for there to be a margin greater than 2-1 unless someone completely collapses.
This means that the pledged delegate race is effectively, though not officially, over.
However, due to how close the race is and thanks top point (b), Obama still isn't likely to officially win a majority of pledged delegates for a while - probably not until the Kentucky and Oregon primaries on May 20th.
In short, short of a complete Obama collapse, he's going to win the pledged delegate count, it's just a matter of when.
All Delegates
Next, let's look at all delegates, including superdelegates:
Things aren't quite as dire here for Clinton, though she's still in bad shape.
Obama leads with 1,726 (42.7%) delegates while Clinton has 1,594 (39.4%) and Edwards has his 18 (0.4%) with currently 706 delegates unallocated (17.5%)*
* - I should note that 3 additional superdelegates will be added later, as there are guaranteed voting spots (one on IL and two DNC at large spots) which are vacant. In addition to this, there are 3 House special elections in May, which will add an additional superdelegate for each a democrat wins.This is a margin of 132 (3.3%) out of 4,044. Clinton would need to win 59.4% of remaining delegates, not taking into consideration the possibility of Obama superdelegates switching to Clinton.
Assuming remaining pledged delegates split down the middle 50/50, Clinton would need to win 72% of unpledged superdelegates (including the 3 currently vacant ones). Not out of the question if Clinton can somehow make a compelling case that Obama can't win in November, but very difficult to say the least.
To make it more difficult, she has to make up the entire margin of 153 pledged delegates with either pledged delegate gains in the final 9 contests and/or with superdelegates. Meanwhile, her current superdelegate margin only stand at 21, and is getting smaller (albeit slowly) not larger.
However, Obama cannot win a majority of delegates on pledged delegates alone, and would need to win 73% of remaining pledged delegates to win the nomination with the number of superdelegates that he has right now - something which is not going to happen barring a Clinton collapse or Clinton leaving the race.
Again, assuming a 50/50 split in pledged delegates, that would put the two candidates, with no additional superdelegate endorsements, at 1930 and 1798 delegates respectively - both quite a bit short of the 2,022.5 currently needed (2,024 after the three vacant spots are filled).
However, clearly Obama is still in the best shape here.
Popular Vote
Ah, yes. The popular vote. How shall we count thee?
Most unbiased observers don't seem to think Michigan should count, as Clinton was the only one on the ballot, but just for kicks, the total including both Florida and Michigan is thus:
Clinton - 15,108,288 (47.7%)
Obama - 14,970,066 (47.2%)
Others - 1,615,686 (5.1%)
Total - 31,694,040
It's understandable why Clinton's people want to include Michigan, as it gives them about a 130,000 popular vote lead on Obama.
Florida is a stickier issue, however. While most people don't think that delegates should come from it, some unbiased observers have argued that the popular vote count can be legitimately counted as everyone had an equal handicap. If we were to do that, it would look like this:
Obama - 14,970,066 (48.1%)
Clinton - 14,779,979 (47.5%)
Others - 1,349,597 (4.3%)
Total - 31,099,642
Probably neither campaign likes this, even though it seems like the best compromise on the numbers. Clinton doesn't like it because she's behind, while Obama doesn't like it since she's only down by about 180,000 and could plausibly catch him.
Finally, the numbers if both Michigan and Florida are left out:
Obama - 14,398,733 (49.1%)
Clinton - 13,908,993 (47.4%)
Others - 1,046,877 (3.6%)
Total - 29,354,603
It's obvious to see why Obama would want to use these numbers, as he would lead Clinton by about 400,000 votes which, will not totally insurmountable, would be extremely difficult, especially given that the largest state remaining trends Obama.
Also, these don't include votes from the caucuses from Iowa, Nevada, Idaho, Washington, and Maine as we don't have, and will probably never get, official popular vote totals from those states, and only count the popular vote total from Texas (as since you had to vote in the primary to vote in the caucus, if we're counting how many individual people voted per candidate, including clear double voting in the popular vote doesn't make much sense to me).
It seems clear that the popular vote is what Clinton is staking her claim on to persuade superdelegates, but as most things in statistics, each candidate can claim different things based on who and how you count.
Electoral College
And while I don't have a graph for this, just for kicks I wanted to see what an electoral count total for each candidate looked like. And due to the wacky delegate system, I have to even break this down to totals based on popular vote and totals based on delegates.
Based on Popular Vote:
Clinton - 239
Obama - 203
Give Clinton 266 if you include Florida, and 283 (enough for a EV majority, by the way) if you include Michigan.
Based on Delegates won:
Obama - 231
Clinton - 197
And give Clinton 224 with Florida, and 241 with Michigan. This doesn't count New Hampshire or Missouri since they were delegate ties.
Whew, and we probably have at least 3 weeks (and probably at least 5 weeks) to go.
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