I understand why this is being spun as a big win for Hillary. But it wasn't. Here's why.

enki23

(1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore

Wed Mar-05-08 01:54 PM
Original message

I understand why this is being spun as a big win for Hillary. But it wasn't. Here's why.

Edited on Wed Mar-05-08 02:25 PM by enki23

First, remember the big margins everyone was saying she was going to need to win to stay competitive? She didn't get those. She didn't get anything *close* to those margins. All she can hope, from here on out, is that a) Barack Obama's campaign completely implodes, for some as yet unforeseen reason, or b) she manages to hold on just enough, maybe even make a few gains in spite of the fact that the demographics of many of the remaining contests don't favor her, and overturn what would very probably still be a substantial delegate advantage for Obama via the superdelegates.

To do the second, which is the only one of the options she can plan for, her campaign has to do its damned best to push this idea of "momentum." Momentum, as it is (mostly stupidly) used during political campaigns and other sporting events, is the mostly erroneous idea that recent events count more. Somehow, a touchdown at the beginning of the game is worth less than one near the end. And just like in sporting events, it's mostly bullshit. A major difference is that politics, as a popularity contest, is a perception game. So she has to hope, not necessarily unreasonably, that June, July, or August Democrats will believe February was just too long ago to count.

Anyway, the real problem here is that the math didn't get better for her last night. It got considerably worse. Before last night there just under a thousand pledged delegates left to be allocated by the primaries and caucuses of the remaining states. Approximately 370 delegates (according to Slate's delegate calculator numbers) have been or will be assigned based on yesterday's results, resulting in a net gain of around ten or so delegates for Hillary Clinton. Now 370 / 981 remaining delegates (again, going to Slate's delegate calculator), means that nearly forty percent of the remaining pledged delegates were allocated last night. And she gained ten(ish), against a 150+ pledged delegate lead. At that rate (and these were some of her strongest remaining possibilities, remember) she would expect to gain fewer than 20 more delegates. Obviously it's not quite that simple, but this still should be a pretty good example of just where she's actually sitting. I would argue that in delegate terms, she's considerably worse off than she was before yesterday. Public perception, of course, is another matter. That brings us back to what she really has to do. She has to create the perception that later contests mean more than earlier, and convince the superdelegates that this recency is sufficient justification for overturning what will still almost certainly be a substantial (100+) delegate lead for Barack Obama, barring any massive changes in the voting patterns so far.

In a football analogy, she needed a touchdown ,and probably a two point conversion, to have a reasonable chance to stay in this thing. But even with good field position, and a reasonably good series of downs (marred only a little by a nasty personal foul she wasn't called for) she still had to settle for a field goal. And she wasted over a third of the remaining clock to do it. Now she's gotta keep it as close as she can and hope the refs decide to declare her the winner anyway. In this particular game of football, that could actually happen.