Wednesday, March 05, 2008

State Projections Look Pretty Good {Edited to Fix My Screwup KennyB Caught}
In my delegate obsession update below, part of my calculation is a 3-poll average of upcoming states, plus allotting the leftover to Clinton 2:1. That ended up pretty close to the actual results last night. Below are the popular vote results, with the projection in parenthesis.

Vermont Obama 59 - Clinton 39 (59.3 - 40.7)
Ohio--Clinton 54.3 - Obama 44.0 (54.4 - 45.6)
Rhode Island--Clinton 58 - Obama 40 (54.9 - 45.1)
Texas--Clinton 50.9 - Obama 47.4 (51.8 - 48.2)

The delegates are a little different story. From the looks of it, Hillary gained maybe 5 in RI, 4 in TX and 11 in OH. Obama gained 3 in VT and will likely gain a few in the TX caucus as results come in the next few days. Let's just say that Clinton gained somewhere in the neighborhood of 15 for the night, reducing Obama's pledged delegate lead to about 135.

There are 338 left to come. To gain 135 and take the pledged delegate lead, she will have to win them 247-91, 73% of the remaining delegates. And there's this: she's not going to win WY or MS this weekend, so that number will go up.

{That was wrong - way wrong. Here are the real numbers:
There are 611 left to come. To gain 135 and take the pledged delegate lead, she will have to win them 373-238, 61% of the remaining pledged delegates. As it is not looking likely that she can gain during the 45 coming up this next week, she will have to win at least 62% of the delegates in states beyond that. She has only captured 62+% of the vote in 1 state thus far: Arkansas.

Her chances are better than I credited earlier when I typed the original version, but I still believe she can't win the pledged delegate vote without re-opening FL and MI and getting some big wins along the way. Maybe it's fair to make him prove he can close the deal, but it seems selfish and hurtful to the party, given that she insists on praising McCain's experience in comparison, and play coy about Obama's religion.}

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