How about we all stop writing diaries in which we predict how the elections are going to turn out? It seems extremely pointless to me, especially in an era when we’ve seen wildly divergent predictions and results in the presidential race. I have long thought that diaries that state “Well, come back and talk to me after <my candidate> wins <favorite state> by 20%” are pointless. If your candidate does in fact win by such a landslide you have the satisfaction of seeing them do well whether or not you make this claim, and if they do not win you end up looking unnecessarily foolish.
It’s probably useful for campaigns themselves to make predictions internally about how they’re going to do in various states, but that’s because it can inform their decisions about where to spend money and candidate time in the hopes of getting the best return on the effort. You and I have no such impact on how the candidates behave, and frankly we’re unlikely to have any influence on whether or not anybody else on DKos decides to vote for the candidate they’ve already chosen.
So, all of these articles yammering on about The Math and whether or not it matters are somewhat pointless since we know how to do math but don’t have any solid idea about the values to be put into the equations. I can easily produce a list of delegate margins for each of the remaining states that shows that Hillary or Bernie can win by at least 1 vote if things work out according to my list, but when it’s clear that professional pollsters cannot predict the margins all that closely I’d just be typing numbers into a list without a grounding in reality.
Further, note that while I’m an avowed Bernie supporter (already cast my early vote for him here in NC), I think this applies to both sides. Bernie wasn’t supposed to get blown out quite so badly in either Mississippi or South Carolina, and obviously was supposed to lose Michigan by a double-digit margin, so I don’t think that anybody pointing out that he has a specific path to the nomination is any more right than I agree with the articles “proving” that he has no path. Until one of the candidates has an absolute majority of the votes both of them have a chance to win.
The one data point that might be useful is something showing the margin that a given candidate has to win the remaining states by in order to win the nomination. Knowing that Bernie has to get 57%* of all remaining delegates is interesting information to the extent that it informs how likely it is that he can succeed in getting that margin; when it gets to the point that one candidate has to win 90% or more of the delegates I think we can agree that isn’t going to happen and I’d be willing to concede defeat.
*I have no idea what the actual number is at this point, and I’m pretty sure it’s going to change after each day of voting, so don’t waste your time demonstrating your l33t math skillz showing how the actual number is 56.49%.