Thursday, May 15, 2008

How Hillary could still win the nomination

I was just playing around with slate.com's delegate calculator widget thingy. It lets you see what the delegate counts will be for each remaining state based on percentages of popular vote which you get to choose using nifty little slider bars.

I noticed something kind of kewl. If Hillary wins 3 of the remaining 5 contests by 85%, and the other 2 (at least one of which has to be Kentucky, Oregon, or Puerto Rico, since they have the big delegate counts among the remaining contests) by 86% (thus taking *all* the delegates by Obama not meeting the 15% threshold), then she can achieve a *tie* among all pledged delegates (1617.5 to 1617.5)

Oh dear, wait, that doesn't really work, since Obama picked up at least 8 of Edwards' pledged delegates today and yesterday, and slate's calculator hasn't fixed for that yet. So ... She needs 8 more. So ...

Looks like she'll need to win 3 of them by 86%, and at least two of those have to come from Kentucky, Oregon, or Puerto Rico. And she could win the other two by only 80%, and still end up with a 4 delegate lead among pledged delegates (assuming, of course, that none of the other 12 Edwards delegates endorses Obama)

And then she would merely have to stem ... er, that is, reverse, the tide of superdelegates flowing to Obama (a gain of 40 for Obama and 3 for Clinton over the last two weeks)

It could still happen. I mean she's still got another ... at least 50 million dollars to loan her campaign, right?

I wonder if all those superdelegates feel generally better about themselves these days, with the whole country using this relatively positive word to talk about them in the media, practically every day? I would. I'd get up in the morning and look in the mirror and say "You are a *SUPER* delegate! You are *SUPER*. Everybody says so." =p