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Dampen Your Expectations

By Jack M. Balkin

For the past couple of weeks I've been blogging about how, regardless of how many states Senators Clinton and Obama each "win" tonight, the Democratic primary system is not like the electoral college -- winner does not take all -- and therefore neither one of them is likely to emerge from today as a prohibitive favorite in terms of actually securing a majority of delegates. Over at Open Left, Chris Bowers has now run some numbers, and he calculates that the largest possible delegate spread between the two candidates after this evening is likely to be no more than 75 delegates, and that as of tomorrow morning both candidates will need to win over 1000 more delegates for a majority -- probably more than 1100 -- with only 1428 pledged delegates remaining to be chosen in primaries and caucuses. Thus, in order to win the nomination without the aid of "superdelegates," either candidate would need to win more than three-quarters of the remaining pledged delegates, something that is virtually inconceivable. (It's theoretically possible that the media, the public and the financial contributors would anoint one candidate the putative winner after today. It's an unlikely scenario, however -- perhaps possible only if something very big and unexpected happens, such as Clinton winning Georgia, or Obama winning California or New York. Even then, the delegate count will be so close -- and the likelihood of a single candidate winning three-quarters of the remaining delegates so unlikely -- that the "losing" candidate today will have a very strong claim for continuing to press his or her case up to the convention, with more than a remote chance of prevailing.)

Thus, if Bowers's calculations are correct (and I have no idea whether they are, but they probably aren't too far off), it then appears that the nomination will be decided by the superdelegates, who make up about one-fifth of the voting delegates at the convention. The interesting question, I think, is whether those superdelegates (mostly elected officials and DNC members) would possibly vote to give the nomination to the candidate who goes to Denver with fewer delegates than the other. Say, for instance, that Candidate A has 1900 pledged delegates and Candidate B has 1850. If the superdelegates voted for Candidate B, wouldn't the supporters of Candidate A, and the party as a whole, have good cause to cry bloody murder? Would the scenario be different if one candidate or the other had "won" the popular vote in considerably more states than the other, delegate-totals notwithstanding? (In which case, is it possible that tonight's popular vote, and statewide winners, might make a big difference, after all, because of what they could portend for the superdelegate vote in August?) What role, dare I ask, might Al Gore's endorsement play in all of this?

The plot thickens. (Of course, I reserve the right to take it all back if something unexpected happens this evening!)

[There is one thing we can be fairly certain of with respect to today's vote: We will have even more reason, above and beyond the huge miscalculations in New Hampshire and South Carolina, to treat polling results with great skepticism. The polls for today's elections are all over the map, and they can't possibly all be right. Perhaps we ought to think twice about the fact that such polling continues to set the baseline for the all-important "expectations" that all-too-often govern the fate of modern candidates.]

Full post as published by Balkinization on February 05, 2008 (boomark / email).