Wednesday, May 7, 2008

It Ain't Over Until The Lady Sez It's Over

Well, results are in from Tuesday. A big win for Obama, as he rolls North Carolina while Clinton squeaked out a win in Indiana. Remember, this is not like the electoral college. Proportional representation means there's little difference between a small win and a small loss. According to the current CNN count, Hillary is up 4 delegates from Indiana while Obama's margin in North Carolina is 16, for a net win of 12 delegates.

(note: CNN says that there were only 172 delegates in play yesterday. I thought that there were 214, that may be a count that includes super delegates from the states, or it may be a mixed popular vote/caucus system like Texas, I don't really know. HMM, CNN has internally inconsistent totals as of this writing, look here. No idea what's going on there... )

Anyway, the upshot of all this is there is no way Hillary is going to win. There just aren't enough votes and delegates out there for her to win to close the gap. That said, her campaign is insisting she is not going to quit. So basically this will keep going until she decides to stop. There's some speculation that she may keep going just to raise enough money to retire the debt her campaign has built up.

Obama's campaign is taking it's argument to superdelegates now in an attempt to finish this process.

UPDATE: Ah, I bet this accounts for the discrepency. Apparently Indiana and North Carolina were awarded "bonus" delegates because they delayed their primaries until later in the season. Trying to account for these is probably why the number of delegates doesn't seem to match up.

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