are for him to stay the course. I'm not a quitter nor is he so I expect him to come to the convention head held high

Please show us how Bernie could do this.

The numbers are pretty achievable. Tough, but not implausible

The author pretends that super delegates don't exist and that the nominees have to earn the total delegates all as pledged delegates.

This isn't a matter of opinion or interpretation. It's simply false.

It's like getting in your car and saying "I think that the speed limit on my route to work today is 95 mph."

There are two ways to look at the route to nomination. You can set aside the super delegates and calculate how the candidates will earn delegates. If you do it that way, you have to leave the super delegates out of the total.

You'll note I said Sanders could plausibly have more pledged delegates going into the convention.

I've heard it said that super delegates will support the winner of the pledged delegates. ... but what if that winner is Sanders?

what are you yelling about?

The basis of his "argument" begins in paragraph four, where he states:

reach 2383 before the convention, he then goes on to show that Bernie has a path to 2026 pledged delegates before the convention.

what am I missing here? Please explain it to me.

You are correct that he uses the majority of pledged delegates - except when he doesn't. Why does he include the first argument, when its basis is utterly specious?

But I'll play along for fun. What part of the article did you find false or implausuble?

and if he finishes strongly in the other contests, he will have made up or nearly made up his lag in pledged delegates.

you may find that implausible, but he's crushed in western states.

Like I said, let's see what happens, this could get interesting.

Having lived there, I think his appeal in CA will be very high.

Anyway, let's see what happens. No need for him to drop out or concede for a while yet.

He is not winning California, and certainly not by thirty fives points, which is what he needs. There has never been a contested Democratic presidential primary in CA where the winner won by more than ten points.

And Oregon only has 61 delegates. California has 475.

We've all seen Sanders do poorly in diverse states so there is high probability another poor performance will repeat itself in California, in fact, he's trailing badly in the polls there.

And Jersey will be a repeat of New York right across the river — it's just about over.

Hell, it might finish up today in Indiana.

And he is trailing badly here:

http://www.realclearpolitics.com/epolls/2016/president/ca/california_democratic_presidential_primary-5321.html


especially if throw out the FOX outliar.

27% latino, 16% african american, and 18% asian. Non-hispanic white is only 34% of the Sacramento population compared to 78% for Oregon, and 71% for Washington! Bernie doesn't have a chance in hell of winning CA.

Okay. Pablum, but also true. As we see.

...in fact, she's indicated that she's fine with him continuing, but that she's convinced she's on track for the nomination.

thank you for that.

...where it goes off the rails is claiming that Superdelegates will be scared into voting for Sanders because of "tens of thousands" of Sanders protesters in the streets.

Presumably the tens of thousands who couldn't be bothered to show up for the ENOUGH IS ENOUGH rally in DC?

support Clinton. That part of the equation has always been very much full of the same corruption that Clinton and the top of the party swim in, and so I find it improbable that the supers will support Sanders, even if he leads by a small margin of the pledged delegates.

But that too would be an interesting occurrence.

He won't even be close. The article is a fantasy.

I'm still chuckling....its mathematically impossible for sanders to attain pledged delegate lead over hillary

as he has done in all of the west, and is close in the other remaining contests, this could happen.

And don't be so lazy.

Win every other state by 30% or more.

in general, so I'm not sure it's a fair state to pick as a predictor of races to follow.

In fact, less so. Do the math.

There's no way. No-fucking-way, that Bernie has more pledged delegates at the time of the Convention.

Sid

The argument is that Hillary can't secure a majority of all delegates with pledged delegates only.

Fair enough, but the idea that the SDs are going to abandon the will of a majority of voters, who happens to be the establishment candidate is ludicrous, and might I add quite hypocritical.

a pledged delegate lead? And how that might come about.

The superdelegates will then abandon the will of the voters to support the establishment candidate. That I think is very probable. The superdelegates are party insiders who are as corrupted as DWS and the Clintons are.

Sanders is behind big and losing ground

That being said, if Sanders had the PD lead, his supporters will be well within their rights to call it an unfair process, and many Hillary supporters would agree with him. The hypocrisy here is that I haven't heard a peep from his supporters given that the shoe will likely be on the other foot.

I don't understand.

After Bernie won NH, his supporters were up in arms about the possibility that the SDs would throw the election to Hillary if Bernie came to the convention with a PD lead.

Also, Bernie has spent the entire campaign railing against rigged systems and corrupt insiders. Now, since it benefits him, he wants these same party insiders to overturn the will of a majority of Democratic voters, and hand him the nomination.

he wants to win the nomination. And he thinks he would be a better general election candidate.

But this article/argument is based on the idea that Sanders wins the pledged delegate count. So no hypocrisy in this particular argument.

Right now the rolling average for California is 51-41.3. That has to be converted to percent since the total does not equal 100. The converted percent is 55.3% - 44.7%. Sanders is not going to get anything near 60% let alone 64.6%.

Also, extrapolating caucus states to primary states is the dumbest thing I've ever seen in my life.

Let them (BSers) have their fantasy; they don't do math (in the conventional sense). To make up for it they are cute!

Last edited Tue May 3, 2016, 06:56 PM - Edit history (1)

Yes, at this moment in time it is theoretically possible for Sanders to get to 2026 pledged delegates, in much the same way that it is technically possible for a baseball team that needs to win 13 games in a row to tie for first place. But no one would think that the latter is plausible simply because it is theoretically possible. Plausibility requires an analysis of additional factors, an analysis that Laurits hasn't attempted. For example, returning to my baseball example - how good are the teams that would have to be defeated in those last 13 games? What sort of record has the team needing the wins compiled against the team(s) it is playing.

Laurits doesn't do any such analysis. Instead, Laurits simply assumes that because the average margin of victory in the 17 contests that Sanders won (excluding Vermont which he concedes to be an outlier) is 65 percent or thereabouts, it is plausible that Sanders will win the remaining 13 contests by 65 percent. There are two things wrong with this analysis.

First, Laurits should have averaged Sanders results from all 43 contests not just the ones he won. There is no reason to believe that the remaining contests all are so similar to the ones Sanders won that there is no chance of him losing any of them.

Second, Laurits also is guilty of the mistake of assuming that things that aren't alike are alike. Of the seventeen contests that Laurits averaged together, 11 were caucuses (65 percent). Only 6 were primaries. And 6 of the 7 largest margins of victory that Bernie achieved -- margins that skew the average to the high side -- were in caucuses. But of the remaining 13 contests, only 3 are caucuses. And those caucuses are worth only a de minimis number of delegates.

Finally, the fact that Laurits overestimates the plausibility of the result he describes can be seen by the fact that the exact same methodology could be employed to figure how Clinton is going to do in the last 13 races. Throwing out her most lopsided victory, and taking the average margin in the remaining 24, you get an average margin of victory of slightly over 60 percent. Thus, it is just a plausible that Clinton will get 60+ percent of the remaining delegates (which would push her well over the 2026 mark and give her a margin of around 500 delegates going into the convention) as it is that Sanders will capture 65 percent of those remaining delegates.

In short, Laurits math is just cleverly disguised speculation and hope with no actual analysis of the plausibility of the result.

Sanders will likely finish with fewer than 1900 pledged delegates.