Clinton is actually spreading her money around a wide field, while Sanders is spending a more concentrated amount on the states in which he has the best chance to win—Colorado, Massachusetts, Minnesota, and Oklahoma (not coincidentally the whitest states that day, along with Vermont). He’s also dropping a tiny bit of coin (just $32,000) in Texas, perhaps a strategic regional play to pick up delegates. (Interestingly, Clinton has dropped a tiny $7,000 in Vermont, which will be a Bernie rout.) He has effectively quit on South Carolina (with Clinton working to run up the score, the exact inverse of New Hampshire).
The problem for him: Colorado, Massachusetts, Minnesota, Oklahoma, and Vermont only have 288 delegates, while all other states that day total 571 delegates. Proportional allotment of delegates will limit the damage, but it’s hard to see Sanders exiting March 1 without a big delegate deficit (and I don’t count super delegates, who won’t overturn the will of the voters without sparking a destructive civil war).
David Wasserman, a non-partisan election analyst at Cook Political Report, has done some math:
Clinton's strong performance in Latino and African-American precincts in Nevada corroborates the findings of a February NBC/Wall Street Journal national poll that shows Clinton leading Sanders 73 percent to 23 percent among African-Americans and 56 percent to 39 percent among Latinos. If those margins were to translate into votes in South Carolina and elsewhere, we estimate Clinton would win 496 pledged delegates between now and March 1, to just 422 for Sanders.
If those projections held, that would mean an overall 547-473 Clinton delegate lead—a 54-46 percent lead with about a quarter of the (pledged delegate) vote in. It’s obviously not impossible, but Sanders would have to start winning a majority of delegates at some point to claw his way toward parity, and his problems remain the same problems he’s always had: Far less familiarity than Clinton enjoys, along with a demographic profile not overly appealing in our modern and diverse Democratic party.
Sanders’ strategy at this point is to provide his campaign impetus to continue moving forward, and winning Colorado, Massachusetts, and Minnesota would certainly provide that—giving the campaign reason to celebrate, and giving supporters something to cheer.
To this point, his campaign has spent heavily to get in the game. Now he’s strategically targeting his dollars to stay in the game. But actually winning the game? The path toward that remains hazy, and focusing resources on a shrunken map doesn’t improve his odds.
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