Via Political Wire, I’ve come across an assessment by WaPo’s Paul Kane that succinctly says what many of us already know:
Here’s the math. There are 3,253 pledged delegates, those doled out based on actual voting in primaries and caucuses. And you need 2,025 to win the nomination. To date, about 55% of those 3,253 delegates have been pledged in the voting process—with Clinton and Obama roughly splitting them at about 900 delegates a piece. That means there are now only about 1,400 delegates left up for grabs in the remaining states and territories voting.
So, do the math. If they both have about 900 pledged delegates so far, they need to win more than 1,100 of the remaining 1,400 delegates to win the nomination through actual voting.
Ain’t gonna happen, barring a stunning scandal or some new crazy revelation. So, they’ll keep fighting this thing out, each accumulating their chunk of delegates, one of them holding a slight edge and both finishing the voting process with 1,600 or so delegates. And then the super delegates decide this thing. That’s the math.
If I were Howard Dean, I’d be very tempted to start working on a deal between Hillary, Obama, and with the superdelegates to identify the nominee-apparent, now that the picture on the GOP side is virtually set. I mean, if it is going to come down to the superdelegates, why wait until August?
An alternative strategy would be to achieve some sort of gentlepersons’ agreement between the Hillary and Obama campaigns, to use the lack of a clear nominee-apparent to co-campaign for the Dems’ ticket in general, keeping interest up, but hopefully not inflaming intra-party squabbling that would only serve to benefit the GOP.
I suppose that such a play-nice-until-the-convention arrangement would have one added potential benefit, from the Dems’ point of view—would the lack of a clear Democratic candidate affect Bloomberg’s interest in running?
Mmmm…political strategery: fun stuff to consider (at least until your head explodes from the complexity).