Wednesday, March 02, 2016

Last night, Bernie and a few other people reminded us that it's not over yet

I watched Bernie's speech last night, the one he gave in Vermont where he won 86% of the primary vote. We've just been through the first SuperTuesday, and it would be easy to say that Bernie didn't win last night. But while perusing Google Plus, I found this:


Indeed, Clinton now has an almost 3-1 advantage - its actually less of an advantage than she had over Obama. 


Notice the proportion of superdelegates to the votes above. Clinton has a very large contingent of superdelegates now supporting her. Remember who many of them are: Democratic Party elites that have essentially bought into the pay to play system that Hilary is so entrenched in now. If we look at the numbers of delegates in detail what we see is that 455 of Clinton's delegate count are superdelegates. That means that the regular delegate count for her is 546.

Sanders on the other hand, has 22 superdelegates in those 371 total delegates for a net of 349. Here's the rub: if Sanders can bring in the popular vote, the superdelegates will be wary of voting for Clinton against the popular vote. We saw this in 2008 as well. As this article from the Washington Post notes, it is highly unlikely that the superdelegates would snatch the victory away from Sanders.

As Sanders has noted in his speech last night, this is not a winner take all election, not at all like the general election. He made everyone aware last night, that every state has their own rules about how delegates are allocated after the primary election. He's been doing elections for 14 years, so I would expect him to know this and what he knows is the long game. Both Hilary and Bernie saw what happened in 2008 and they both know that where the popular vote goes, so goes the superdelegates.

The actual vote so far, in terms of regular delegates, is what we should be looking at:

Hilary                        Sanders
  546                              349
  61%                             39%

Which means in terms of regular delegates Hilary really only has a 22 point lead right now with 15 states voted so far and 35 to go. I know, it seems like a overwhelming lead now. But there is still a very real possibility that this election could play out much the same way that it did for Obama, and this time, the margins are closer than with Obama.

Sanders has said he is in it to win it until every state has voted. There is no reason for anyone to think that he should concede right now, unless you're a member of the mainstream press. And you have financial ties to the Clintons. And you'd like the rest of us to ignore her unfavorability polling. And you'd like us to fail to notice a pending FBI investigation into her email scandal with a contingent of 150 investigators.

This is just the beginning, so make sure you get out to vote because it's not over yet. Not by a long shot.

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