Statistics. DU's guide to despair.

There is an elephant in the room.. well, more like a giant donkey.

To get the nomination before the convention, a candidate has to get over half of the delegates to be pledged to him/her.

That means that a candidate is going to have to win *over half* of the delegates in any given state or in effect, fall further away from being able to accomplish this goal.

So far, only Obama has won over half the delegates in any given state, his "rout" in SC. There, he gained 2 delegates over the half he needed to get just to stay even with the game.

So far, not counting super-delegates, there have been 137 delegates granted. Of these, one would need 69 delegates to meet the goal of half of the delegates. Obama has 63, still 6 delegates short of "holding his own" in a path to a non-brokered convention.

We sit here, and piss each other off because of this race. Should Florida count? I don't know, because I haven't seen the results, but I doubt that Clinton would have gotten 50% of the delegates, had they been awarded. The result? If Florida were to count, Clinton would be further away from her goal of getting half the delegates. Obama and Edwards would be even further away.

Unless someone drops out, and I doubt that they will, no one will have a majority of the delegates pledged from the primaries and caucuses. The real battle will be super-delegates, and our candidate will probably have to make a lot of promises, each of them deemed unsavory promises by those who do not support that candidate.

Our arguments keep changing to suit our needs. Some people count states won, when convenient, some people count delegates won (again, when convenient) and others count actual votes, some pledged + super-delegates (yadda yadda yadda).

We need to start realizing at how much further away each primary results put our candidate away from their goal, to get a majority of the delegates. I don't think the primary voters/caucus goers themselves will grant a majority to any candidate. Even if they do, they can be slapped down by the will of the super-delegates.

The long and short, any candidate is going to have to make compromises to get the nomination. Constant pissing on your opponent's supporters at this point of the game is going to make that point in time very distasteful for most of us.

How do you figure?

Even if the other candidates won delegates (as they undoubtedly would), Clinton would have won more delegates and hence the discrepancy between her and Obama would have been reduced or overcome.

EDIT: Your argument would only be true if her opponent were close to the 2025 needed and the extra delegates pushed him over the edge.

It is about getting *over half* of the delegates. Even if you get more delegates, but don't get half, you are going to have to make that up down somewhere down the road.

These are not elections. The election will be in November. This is primary voting. Primary voting for president is a delegate allocation process. The number of votes matter, but they matter more in big states and matter less in little states. YOu can win the Nevadas, Iowas, New Hampshires, even South Carolinas and it won't matter because that can all be wiped out if you do poorly in one or two big states.

Look at some of the posts here.

I am not saying everyone should be up on the nuances, or even the math... but people are setting themselves up to a) lose credibility because they think that a delegate here or there is make or break to their campaign, and b) being very disappointed when they find out otherwise.

If their delegates counted, Hillary would have won them all (about 57, I think).

Most (or all) of the "Super Tuesday" states are also "winner take all" states. That's why there was so much talk about the nominee possibly being decided by "Super Tuesday".

would have been 215.


On edit, I just saw the total number of delegates would have been 210, so Clinton would have to have gotten 106 or more to profit from seating the delegation (on delegate count alone).

to read the posts before you commented.

1 vote more than anyone else is all it takes to seat MI and FL.

to become the nominee, and the DNC says (now) that only the nominee can choose to seat them.

What it boils down to, is you could have over half the votes to become the "nominee in waiting", then seat the delegation and suddenly have under half the total number of delegates required to win.

Granted, I haven't seen if Hillary's 50 percent win would have gotten her over half the delegates from the state, but if Florida's delegates are counted, then you have to have more delegates to win. So, if you don't get over half, seating the delegation will make you lose ground.