Among supporters of both candidates, it's generally agreed upon that Senator Clinton has little chance of catching Senator Obama in terms of pledged delegates, but maintains a pathway to the nomination that relies upon winning enough of the remaining states to convince the requisite amount of superdelegates to overturn the pledged delegate result. While it will be difficult to get the superdelegates to overturn the results of the actual voting, it may be considerably less so if there is a case that they won't be going against "the will of the people" at the same time. If she can't come up with a lead in pledged delegates, it seems that Clinton will need a lead in the popular vote to have a legitimate claim to contest the nomination at the convention in Denver.
Clinton's big win in Ohio has convinced her that she can repeat her success next month among white working-class voters in Pennsylvania, another populous swing state.
It could put her on course to overtake Obama in the total number of votes cast, giving moral legitimacy to her claim that superdelegates - the 796 party leaders, governors and congressmen expected to hold a casting vote - should back her.
A senior Clinton official said: "The momentum is shifting to us right now. If we are the leader in the popular vote and we have closed the gap in pledged delegates, that's a very persuasive argument."
I have therefore decided to spend too much of my free afternoon in an attempt to project the popular vote totals through the next round of states to determine the likelihood that Clinton can accomplish this feat. This is a long diary, so in case you don't want to read through all of the details, here are my basic conclusions:
1. By including estimates from the currently unreported results from Iowa, Nevada, Washington, and Maine in the national popular vote total, Obama's popular vote lead increases from 592,682 votes to 705,691 votes, an all-important increase of 113,009 votes.
2. If upcoming states vote in similar numbers to states with similarly sized pledged delegations to the national convention, there will be about 6,156,919 votes cast in the Democratic Primary between the Mississpi contest on Tuesday and the concluding South Dakota and Montana contests on June 3rd. Senator Clinton will need to win 55.73% of these votes in order to catch Obama for the popular vote lead. In other words, Clinton will have to perform slightly better the rest of the way through than she did in Ohio last Tuesday.
3. If current polling in Mississippi, Pennsylvania, and North Carolina accurately predicts the actual voting results, Clinton will need 61.4% of the votes in Guam, Indiana, West Virginia, Oregon, Kentucky, Puerto Rico, Montana, and South Dakota to capture the popular vote lead. This will be very difficult because Arkansas is so far the only state where she has broken 60% of the popular vote.
4. Including Florida, whether by seating their current delegation or by using the expected results of a revote, cuts the level of support Clinton must obtain across the remaining states to 53.3%. If MS, PA, and NC go down as indicated by polling, she will need 55.85% of the popular vote in the other remaining states to catch Obama. However, at least three of these other states should favor Obama, making it extremely difficult to reach this necessary level.
5. Given the above findings, Clinton must cut into or eliminate Obama's leads in Mississippi and North Carolina, win huge in Pennsylvania, and fundamentally alter the present voting dynamics in order to defeat for the popular vote title. She will also likely have to rely on seating the Florida delegation and maintaining her present lead if there is a revote. If there is a revote in Michigan, it looks like it will be a tie and therefore not a factor in the popular vote totals.
STATE BLOGS
