We talked a bit on the podcast about how to interpret general election polls. With Ivan saying they were meaningless at this stage because they weren’t good predictors of the election results, and me saying they did matter because they reflect the state of the race NOW.

The analogy I should have used was that of a sports event. The score at any given time in the game does NOT tell you with any certainty who will win. It is an indicator. If one team is way ahead, then the other team would have to do something really extraordinary to win… and they probably won’t, but they might… but fundamentally the score in the middle of the game does not tell you who will win, it tells you the state of the game NOW. And that is not irrelevant or meaningless… it just tells you something different.

This is how general election polls should be interpreted. Not as predictors of the winner at the end of the game (the election) but rather as a snapshot of where things are RIGHT NOW. Which is different.

And of course, looking at national popular vote polls *is* irrelevant. That is not the game that is being played. The game being played is the electoral college. You need to look at state by state polls only. The national popular vote DOES NOT MATTER.

I wasn’t sure if CNN would be doing more updates of their delegate counts, but indeed they have. In today’s update, Obama gains 43 delegates while Clinton loses 30. There are 131 Democratic delegates still unaccounted for.

And there were updates on the Republican side too. 58 more delegates for McCain, 16 for Romney and 3 for Huckabee. There are 221 Republican delegates still unaccounted for.

Oh yeah… I was still at work when I got my CNN Breaking News alert on my phone about Clinton’s plans to officially suspend her campaign this weekend…. So I didn’t post anything at the time.

Not much new to comment other than thank goodness. As much fun as it would be to watch her stretch this out, it is better this way.

Now we’ll see just how she does it and if she manages to actually undo any of the damage she has been doing lately.

As we all know, the main news since the last update is that Obama passed the magic number to clinch the nomination, absent major catastrophe between now and the convention. But there were actual primary results too.

27 of the 31 delegates from Montana and South Dakota have now been determined. So far Obama has gotten 14 of them and Clinton has gotten 13 of them. With 4 delegates left to be determined.

In the mean time though Obama also got 59… that is FIFTY NINE… superdelegate endorsements yesterday. And Clinton lost 7 superdelegates to Obama. Obama also got 7 Edwards delegates who switched over.

Net for the day: Obama up 80, Clinton up 6, Edwards down 7. Obama only needed 42 delegates to win, so there we go.

New stats:

Delegate count is: Obama 2156, Clinton 1923, Edwards 6

In percent terms that is: Obama 52.8%, Clinton 47.1%, Edwards 0.1%

2118 delegates were needed to win.

There are 149 delegates yet to be determined.

I just want to take this opportunity to say that the 149 superdelegates who have not yet declared are a bunch of spineless cowards. They all know who they liked, and they have all known for a long time. I’ve heard all the reasons for waiting, but they are all bullshit. All of these people should have declared long ago.

In any case, with Obama past the magic number, if Clinton really wanted to continue to dispute this, she would need to A) Keep fighting to try to get full representation for Florida and Michigan, and reverse the allocation the rules committee gave to Michigan and B) Start convincing a LOT of superdelegates who have declared for Obama to change their minds.

There is no way either of those two things would be successful to a large enough degree to change the results though. So if she does go on, there is no possible positive result, just mischief.

She does realize that if she makes a nuisance of herself at this point the only two possible results are weakening Obama for the general election (perhaps making him lose) and destroying her own future in the Senate and the Democratic party, right? She realizes it, right? It won’t set her up for 2012 or anything. It just won’t.