As always the answer of “who won the weekend?” is, depends on how you look at it.
If you look at the delegate count (and it is the only thing that really matter), Bernie Sanders won the weekend.
Per HuffingtonPost, Sanders has won so far 67 delegates in play this weekend. Clinton won, so far, 64 delegates. A net of 3 delegates for Sanders.
Good for him.
Now, what does that mean for the race for the nomination?
Let’s look at the race as a whole:
672 delegates for Clinton, and 477 delegates for Sanders.
Clinton ahead by 195 delegates. Or 196 if you look at 538.
That’s about the same lead after Super Tuesday. Except that now, there are 134 delegates less in play.
He needs to win a greater percentage of the remaining delegates than he did on Friday.
Well, you might say, he won 3 out of 4 states over the weekend. Surely it shows a momentum that is greater than 3 delegates might indicate.
But, is it?
Sanders won NE by 14% with a total of 19,120 votes.4
He won KS by 35.4% with a total of 26,450
He won ME by 28.8%. No popular vote count. But according to the Party, about 46,000 people participated in the caucus. So for the sake of argument, let’s give Sanders the same percentage of the popular vote. He would have gotten around 29,600.
In Louisiana he lost by 47.9%. Popular vote 72,240
Total popular vote total: 147,410
Clinton got 221,615 votes in LA.
12,593 in KS.
14,340 in NE.
And,say, around 16,000 votes in ME.
Total popular vote: 264,548
Clinton won the popular vote by around 117,000 votes. Or around 64%.
Even if we gave Sanders all of Maine’s popular vote, Clinton would still win by 100,000 votes.
The day after tomorrow there will be 166 delegates in play.
If the polls are correct, she will win Michigan and Mississippi.
Let’s say she gets a net of only 5 delegates. It would bring her lead to about 200. But now, there are 166 less delegates left. The percentage of delegates left that Sanders must win is now higher.
Sanders supporters insist that once “the south” ends voting, the map will get a lot better for him.
But Clinton strength is not geography, it’s demographics.
The more minority voters in a state, the better she does.
There’s absolutely no indication that minority voters, specially Blacks, will vote any differently outside the South.
On the contrary, according to the latest NBC poll of Michigan, Clinton leads African Americans 76% to 21%.
All the states Sanders has won have one common denominator: They’re very white. Or at least minority voters make a small percentage of the voters.
Sanders has not only lost Blacks and Latinos everywhere, but lost them by huge margins. Clinton is actually getting a bigger share of the African American vote than Obama did in 2008.
Mathematically, Sanders can still win the nomination. But he has to start winning big in more diverse states. And unless he can make inroads with minority voters, he won’t be able to.
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