Democratic Delegates from tunesmith on Vimeo.
Excuse my excuse to play with my new toys, but it's so much fun. In the meantime, here's a rough transcript. Also excuse all my uhhs and my general incoherence. :)
Hi this is tunesmith. I wanted to try and give a quick explanation of the delegate situation with Florida and Michigan. What I've done is I've put together a spreadsheet here. This master table here is built off of the numbers from demconwatch.org, along with some additional research I did about the specific situations with both Michigan and Florida.
Then what we've got here is we've got three graphs that are based off of the three different scenarios that we see floating around, in that, the first is where we're at now. This is actually current as of Saturday, May 24th. We can see that Obama has a pledged delegate majority based off of the numbers right now. This majority bar right here is really just an indicator of how many delegates he needs. We can see that he has 1659.5 when the pledged delegate majority would be 1626.5 (1627 actually). He's still got a ways to go in order to reach the overall majority of 2024.5 (2025 actually), which is these two added together, but you can see he's getting there.
The next situation is adding in just the Florida situation as they exist right now. With that one, we have Obama gaining an additional 69 pledged delegates - that includes Edwards' 2 delegates (he originally had 13) - and Clinton gaining an additional 105. Here you can see that Obama still has the pledged delegate majority, and so Florida does not really do anything to undermine his claims, so far.
The wildcard, however, is with Michigan. With Michigan added in, as Clinton argues they should be added in, with her getting an additional 73 pledged delegates, and Obama getting 0, you can see that what happens is that Obama no longer has the pledged delegate majority. He's still ahead of Clinton, but the other thing that is really notable about this is that there is actually less distance between Obama and Clinton than there is between Obama and the pledged delegate majority.
This brings up an important point about the different philosophies of elections. There is the more progressive philosophy of the intent of the voter, and counting from the intent of the voter. But then, there is also the philosophy of each political candidate's ability to power through their narrative. And this is what we saw in 2000 - a lot of people said that maybe Bush actually should have won in 2000 because he was the one that was more powerful in putting through his interpretation of how the votes should have been counted. And if Hillary succeeds in this, then she might actually have an argument in terms of convincing the superdelegates that she is more powerful and therefore deserves the nomination.
The wildcard in this, of course, that Clinton doesn't want anyone to notice, is that there have been some reports that Obama has already gained 31 of these 55 uncommitted Michigan pledged delegates. And if that's true, you can see he's much closer to the pledged delegate majority with Michigan, whereas Clinton is still quite a bit behind. That's where we are now.