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As of two hours after the polls closed, CNN has projected 47 of the 158 delegates (29.7%). Of those, Clinton has 28, Obama has 19. Clinton’s percentage is 59.6%… which is ABOVE the 59.3% she needs to be on a “winning pace” for the nomination. If she keeps up this delegate margin for the rest of the night, this will ACTUALLY be a significant victory for her rather than just a spin victory. Keep watching those delegates. Ignore the popular vote numbers. They don’t matter. About 5 minutes ago CNN declared their projection for Clinton in PA. Popular vote of course. No word yet on the margin in popular vote, let alone the margin in delegates, which is what matters. Of course, Hillary getting over 50% of the popular vote is *NOT* worth even looking at. As I talked about yesterday the only number worth actually watching is if Clinton wins enough delegates to make the percentage of delegates she needs in the rest of the race SMALLER rather than LARGER. In order to do that, she needs to win 94 of the 158 delegates at stake tonight. That is the only number that matters. Or at least it is the only number that SHOULD matter. (If you are looking at CNN’s screens and see the occasional delegate total, be careful, they are showing Pennsylvania superdelegates who declared before today as well as new delegates from today, don’t get confused between the two.) Polls close at 00:00 UTC. I have meetings until 01:00 UTC. Ones that are important and I should be at. If it isn’t close, I may miss the network calling it. Boo Hoo. :-( Well, as soon as the meeting is out at 01:00, I’ll have CNN on Slingbox via my phone… Hopefully I won’t miss anything really good in that first hour of coverage.
CNN does a last update catching up on final tallies for various states. They updated counts in DC, Nebraska, New Jersey, New Mexico and Ohio. End result, Clinton picks up 6 more delegates, Obama picks up 4. Given this is just a few hours before the polls open for a long awaited primary, let me do a full run down on the current stats. There are 4048 democratic delegates. 3170 have already been pledged to a candidate or have stated a preference for a candidate. That leaves 878 delegates left to be determined. 158 are at stake in the Pennsylvania primaries which start in a few hours. Right now the count is: Obama 1648, Clinton 1504, Edwards 18 In percentage terms that is: Obama 52.0%, Clinton 47.4%, Edwards 0.6% 2025 delegates are needed to win. Obama needs 377 more delegates to win. Clinton needs 521 more delegates to win. In percentage terms, that means: Obama needs 42.9% of the remaining delegates to win. Clinton needs 59.3% of the remaining delegates to win. Specifically in terms of tomorrow, that means that in order to be “on pace” to win the nomination, the candidates need to get more than the percentages above. If they get better than the percentage given, then they will need a LOWER percentage in all the remaining contests (including the contest among the remaining superdelegates) to win. If they get less than the percentage given, then they will then need a HIGHER percentage in all the remaining contests. Specifically, since there are 158 delegates at stake that means: Obama needs to win 68 or more delegates of the 158 to be on pace to win. Clinton needs to win 94 or more delegates of the 158 to be on pace to win. Note, this is NOT the popular vote. It is about delegates. We’ll start getting popular vote estimates as soon as the polls close. It may be many hours later before we get delegate estimates. If Pennsylvania follows the pattern of many of the previous states, it may actually be DAYS (or even longer) until we get a full accounting of all 158 delegates here. The media will be all over the popular vote margin. Most likely about just what percentage margin Hillary is winning by. (Absent an Obama upset of course.) But if you are watching any of this, just remember that the POPULAR VOTE NUMBERS ARE IRRELEVANT!!!!! The *only* thing that matters is the delegate count. The popular vote count only matters in that it is a rough predictor of the delegate count before real delegate counts are available. Don’t watch the popular vote numbers, watch the delegate counts. As mentioned, it may take a long time before all 158 are accounted for, but look at the percentages. Is Clinton getting 60% of the delegates? If so, she is doing what she needs to do and it will be a really huge important night for her. If not…. then despite however much anybody is talking about her “win” she will actually have a MORE DIFFICULT ROAD to the nomination, not an easier one. We shall see. I’ll post a delegate update sometime in the evening, but chances are things will still be in flux at that point and we’ll have to wait a bit before we know what really happened. I don’t expect that will stop the press from calling a Clinton win 30 seconds after the polls close and then spending the rest of the evening talking about her popular vote margin and how it stacked up to “expectations”. And then it will be all about whose spin manages to win the night. But if you want to know what is really happening rather than just being spun, just watch the delegate numbers, and see which candidate is at or above the pace they need to win. [Edit 23 Apr 2008, 07:37 UTC – Fixed Typo on Obama percentage, I had miscopied 56.8% as Obama’s number when I was looking at Edwards numbers and misread the decimal point. The correct number is now above… 52.0%.] I’ve been watching the pollster.com PA Page over the last couple of weeks. You can’t just look at the line today, as when they get new polls the “past” of the line changes as well as the present, but what I’ve seen watching it day to day is this trend in Clinton’s lead:
It seems like post-debate and as we run into the stretch the undecideds are breaking for Hillary. She is NOT anywhere close to the 20% margin (in delegates, not popular vote) to really be on pace to catch up on delegates. But she *is* within reach of the 10% or so “big victory” that will undoubtedly have the press falling all over the Hillary momentum story. Bleh. [Edit 10 minutes later: Changed now number from 7.1% to 6.9%, I subtracted wrong.] [Note 30 minutes later: More polls coming in, now number is now 6.1%] [Note at 16:34: Yet more polls, now 6.0%] [Note at 23:37: Even more polls, now 6.3%]
Don’t know how, don’t know why, but CNN just added some delegates to their totals for McCain. 6 delegates total. All were from Ohio. 3 pledged delegates, 3 “Unpledged RNC” (which is the Republican equivalent of a superdelegate). Obviously this changes absolutely nothing about the state of the Republican race. But hey, six more for McCain. Woo! Go McCain!
CNN’s intern has apparently been asleep at the switch in recent days/weeks, because all of a sudden they do a big update on their delegate counts, presumably just catching up with developments they missed when they actually happened because they figured people weren’t paying attention or some such. The way they display their data makes it impossible to completely dissect the changes, but there were updates in the delegate counts in at least seven states, plus there were some new superdelegate revisions. All together, Obama gets 4 new pledged delegates and 8 new superdelegates while Clinton gets 7 new pledged delegates and 2 more superdelegates. Net is Obama gains 12 while Clinton gains 9. Turns out this ratio is pretty close to the ratio of delegates they already had, so this has very little effect on the percent of delegates each candidate has. Since I haven’t mentioned the actual numbers in awhile, here they are. Right now Obama has 52.0% of the delegates, Clinton has 47.4% and Edwards has 0.6%. More importantly though, there are 888 delegates left that have not been allocated or who have not declared a preference. To win Clinton needs 527 of them (59.3%). Caught up on my news feeds. Looks like almost all the Democratic leaning blogs agree with my comments on the questions being horrible, while some right leaning blogs really liked them. Most people all around though seem to think that Clinton did much better than Obama. When I was grading them question by question, I gave both Clinton and Obama six questions, and thought four were ties. So I really didn’t see that. Although in my count Obama only caught up near the end, for most of the debate I had Clinton ahead. And I can certainly see looking back that Clinton was a bit more energized, and Obama was on the defensive a LOT. In the end though, I’ll stick by my conclusion that this debate won’t make much difference one way or another… well… at least I’ll stick by that for now. I remained spoiler and spin free, having not watched, listened to or read anything about the debate until I watched it straight through myself. Having just finished, my thoughts:
At least that is my thought unspoiled by other people’s thoughts. Now it is time to watch a bunch of commentary on it, and read even more. I’ll find out if my thoughts are in line with others, or if I’m completely out on my own. :-) The Pennsylvania Democratic debate starts at 00:00 UTC… just over 15 minutes from now. In the normal case, I would have left work a little early and run home to be sure I could watch it live. But no… ABC is delaying it for the West Coast. It will not be on until 03:00 UTC here. Hours after it happened. Which is just ridiculous for a news event. As several West Coast bloggers have commented, they are treating it like a “show” rather than as news. (Of course, I get pissed off at the 3 hour delay for shows too sometimes.) This is ridiculous. It really makes me want to drop a Slingbox in the house of a friend or relative in the Eastern time zone. Very very annoying. (Yes, I know, they will probably get more viewers this way, but still…) And for the next 3 hours and change I now have to avoid all my usual news feeds and sites to avoid spioilers. Spoilers for a DEBATE. Urg. |
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