Wednesday, May 14, 2008

Arithmecrats 4

Last night, Hillary Clinton won West Virginia by a huge margin, but it did not really make much of a difference in the math. Clinton will likely gain about 10 more pledged delegates in West Virginia than will Obama. For some perspective, Obama has picked up 27 Superdelegates in the last week. Clinton won a landslide margin, but there is not an avalanche of delegates in West Virginia.

So, she won big, but this is not a big win, mathematically speaking. She may be able to make some political hay out of this wide margin, but she is under growing pressure from the party to scale back the negative ads and not damage Obama further as he looks to be the nominee. Obama is already acting like the winner, being very gracious to her in his defeat, scooting off to Michigan and Florida to generate general election support, and talking about debates with John McCain.

The next potential milestone is next Tuesday when Obama could conceivably secure a majority of pledged delegates with a solid win in Oregon (Obama leads by 14 points in current polls) and a decent showing in Kentucky (Clinton leads and is expected to win handily, currently up 28 points).

3 comments:

Travis said...

I can't quite understand why Kentuckians are so enamored with the senator from New York. It's as if you could run the Clinton's dog out there as a candidate and people would get amped up about it.

Anonymous said...
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Cort said...

I'm happy to have disagreement and debate on here, but if you are going to make those kinds of comments (the deleted one), you had better believe it enough to put your name on it.

No anonymous drive-by's against ANYONE, please. Just speak your mind and put your name on it.