A fundamental concern with the current nomination fight is the lack of an obvious exit strategy. How, and when exactly, is this race going to end? Interestingly, though, I think this race is much closer to ending than is widely thought. The Clinton campaign has, in its desperation, argued that the popular vote should be the standard for evaluating who should win the nomination. As I have written previously, I think this is absolutely the wrong standard to apply. Pledged delegates is clearly the correct standard. But if you examine the remaining contests it is becoming increasingly obvious that Obama is in position to claim a popular vote victory on May 6th.
The table below shows the current popular vote and my projections for the remaining contests. I have used the realclearpolitics calculations to estimate the popular vote in the caucus states that did not report popular vote totals. Right now Obama holds an 827 thousand vote lead without Florida, or a 539 thousand vote lead if you include Florida. For Clinton netting at least enough votes in the remaining contests to take the lead in the popular vote is a pre-requisite for making any reasonable claim for the nomination. As my table shows, however, Clinton right now is likely to fall far short of the votes needed to win the popular vote. As it also shows, if the current projections in Pennsylvania, North Carolina and Indiana hold she will have to win the contests after May 6th by nearly 30 percent in order to win the popular vote, a practical impossibility given that she trails by 10 in Oregon.
Obviously the question everyone is asking today is how much does Clinton need to win by? From a popular vote perspective, the answer is not in terms of popular vote, but rather in terms of how many votes she needs to net. As I show below, if you build a best case scenario for Clinton which projects her vote based on the best poll result for her in the remaining contests, she nets 156,989 votes. This means she would need to net 382,232 votes tomorrow. Here is the math:
Obama Lead including Florida
539,141
Clinton net assuming best poll in states after PA
156,989
Margin required in PA to catch Obama
382,232
This table shows the relationship between turnout and Margin of Victory. In order to get close to the roughly 380,000 margin Clinton will need to win by 15 on heavy turnout (my own prediction is for turnout of 2.2 million which is on the high side)
My projections for the rest of the contests are on the flip...
This table shows the current projections for all of the remaining contests. What this table shows is the importance of North Carolina. Right now Obama is likely to net as many votes out of North Carolina as Clinton is likely to net out of Pennsylvania, making it almost impossible for her to win. On the right of the table I have calculated the current best case for Clinton.
The methodology I used for predicting turnout is here.
One of the most important lessons of this primary fight is to use caution in any projection. At each stage of this process there has been more volatility than anticipated. In this spirit, the calculation below is a best case scenario for Clinton that would enable her to catch Obama with the current projection for Pennsylvania. In this scenario Clinton cuts Obama's lead to 2 in North Carolina, and blows him out by 15 in Indiana (where she currently trails by 5 is some recent polling).
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