Surprisingly, the current mutterings from the Sanders campaign are about an open Democratic Convention at which they feel they can sway Super-delegates to support Bernie Politico:
Weaver said it’s highly unlikely either candidate will garner 2,383 pledged delegates to win the nomination. Superdelegates “don’t count until they vote, and they don’t vote until we get to the convention,” Weaver argued. “So when we arrive at the convention, it will be an open convention, likely with neither candidate having a majority of pledged delegates. So I think it’ll be an interesting Democratic convention.”
At first, I frankly thought this was as “delusional” as Kos did. But I gave the people running Sanders’ campaign the benefit of the doubt (i.e. I assumed they probably knew more about getting candidates nominated than I do), and good golly Miss Molly:
If one adds up all of the states and territories still to have primaries and caucuses (including Guam, the Virgin Islands, Puerto Rico and Washington, D.C.) there are only 1661 pledged delegates remaining to be distributed between the two candidates. 1661 divided by 2 is 830.5. Add 830.5 to Secretary Clinton’s current tally of 1280 pledged delegates and she has 2110.5, a rather substantial 271.5 shy of the 2382 to win. Add the same number to Bernie’s current 1030, and he has 1865.5.
This comes to a total of 3971, 79 short of the 4050 overall total of pledged delegates. While I believe Gov. O’Malley has 8 committed to him, I’m not quite sure how to account for the other missing 71 delegates. But in any event, even if these delegates were not split, and were awarded entirely to either Sanders or Clinton, neither would reach the magic number of 2382.
So, it seems to me that the Sanders campaign is right and has made a bit of quick right-turn in startegy that the rest of us are just catching up to. According to these calculations, Sanders only needs to win 55% or 57% or 60% (or whatever estimate one is partial to) of the pledged delegates of the remaining states in order to win the nomination on the first ballot.
But, Bernie apparently needs to win significantly less than 50% in order to prevent Mrs. Clinton from reaching the number of pledged delegates she needs to win on the first ballot. As the Sanders camp also pointed out in the Politico article:
“[If] Bernie Sanders is the nominee, he will get the over, over, overwhelming support of Democrats in this race. The question is who can capture and mobilize young people and independents in this race to bring them out and to have them vote in the general election so that we can elect not just Bernie Sanders but Democrats up and down the ballot,” Weaver said. “Hillary Clinton is not gonna do that. All these young people who are coming out for Bernie Sanders, are they gonna come out for Hillary Clinton? I’m not so confident about that given how many times she’s dissed them recently.”
There are still 3 and one half months to go until the Democratic convention in Philadelphia. Bernie has maintained his current momentum for almost entire year, to the point where he is polling about even with Hillary in national polls of Democrats.
Why is what the Sanders camp is saying now the least bit outlandish?
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