Get yer polls, bets, numbers & pretty graphs! Elections 2008

Pennsylvania has only one benefit over Ohio and that is that it bumps up against New York and New Jersey.

"The doors open at 7 and they close at 7:15. It would be tragic if Hillary were to win this election in the daytime and somebody were to come in at night and take it away."

In the chaotic that was last nights Texas caucus, there is sadly no decisive finish. There is no final crushing blow to Hilary Clinton and there is no final closing of the delegate gap to catch up with Barrack Obama. What we have is essentially a tie.

While Hilary Clinton appears to have secured the popular vote, Barrack Obama has obtained the majority of the delegates. Due to Texas's caucus rules, areas in Texas having previously and more consistently voted Democratic are given more delegates. As a result, Barrack has of course obtained more delegates than Hilary despite having lost the popular vote.

DALLAS-In the end, Obamamania wasn't enough to win the battle for the Texas popular vote, but it could still prove decisive in the delegate war.

Indeed, much of the interpretation of the Solomonic outcome in Texas depends on how you define victory.

...

Clinton won 65 delegates to Obama's 61 in the popular vote, and Obama was ahead 30-27 with 10 delegates still to be awarded from caucuses Tuesday in Texas. It's expected he'll win a majority of them, although Clinton is also claiming victory. (The two-step is actually a three-step, another 35 "superdelegates" will be designated at the state Democratic convention in June).

...
According to Baylor University political science professor Thomas Myers, Clinton won because of a strong turnout among women - who accounted for 60 per cent of the electorate - and Latino voters who have a long history of loyalty to her husband, former president Bill Clinton.

And the overriding reason for her narrow win? Former Democratic strategist James Carville put it best in 1992 when he famously opined: it's the economy, stupid.

"The economy was always going to be the issue in Texas, it always is in election campaigns and right now there's a downturn," Myers said. "American voters have the easiest time integrating pocketbook issues into their voting preference, things like foreign policy sometimes seem too theoretical, and I think we saw that here."

Exit polls showed about two-thirds of the 2.8 million voters in the primary listed the sagging U.S. economy as their main worry, and a healthy majority of them supported Clinton.

Obama's bid to push Clinton to the brink on Tuesday was also hindered by a lower-than-expected turnout among urban voters in Dallas and Houston - who are predominantly black - college-educated men, and young voters.

Several outside experts and Democratic pollsters had forecast blacks and Latinos would represent roughly equal shares of the primary electorate, but the balance tilted heavily toward Clinton-friendly Hispanics at the ballot box.

So while Clinton carried her base, Obama did not.

The "pri-caucus" or Texas Two-Step produced wins for both Democratic candidates.

Clinton took the popular vote in the Lone Star state with 51 percent of the vote, which translated into 1.3 million votes (and 1.2 million votes for Obama). (Final numbers not in). Early it looked like Obama would cruise to an easy victory and a big push for Hillary out of the election door. First figures showed him in the 60 percent range.

As the night went on the gap ever so slowly closed. It was stuck at about 10-12 percent for Obama for a long time, until about 50 percent of the vote was in. Then it was tied and then in an even slower fashion, Hillary Clinton pulled away, despite beliefs that high-density areas would radically swing the Texas race back in Obama's favor.

The caucus, which counts for a third of the Texas delegates awarded last night was 56 percent of the gate for Obama and it has barely wavered since then, with now about 30 percent of the caucus vote accounted for.

How many of the states 228 delegates each won is difficult to work out, but Obama could actually win a few more than Clinton once the results are combined and final.

Posted Thu Mar 6, 2008 at 6:18 AM | Return to home page
It may not have seemed like it, but Barack Obama took a major step closer to the Democratic nomination on Tuesday

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Now that we have emerged from the intensity of Tuesday's primaries, it's become clear that it's winning delegates that matters -- not winning states.

We knew this all along, but probably got a little greedy and hoped to land a knockout blow, ending the campaign prematurely. We didn't, and so the campaign continues.

But even though the campaign didn't end on Tuesday, Barack Obama got closer to winning the nomination -- and Hillary Clinton got further away.

The reason? The delegate math. On Tuesday, Barack Obama cut the number of delegates he needs to win a majority of pledged delegates from 425 to 272. Hillary Clinton just barely managed to get her number down to where Barack Obama started the night.

You can see the numbers on the chart below here.

It shows that we are in a much stronger position than Hillary Clinton because we are closer to the real magic number -- 1,627 -- than she is.

Once we hit 1,627 pledged delegates, Barack Obama will become the nominee -- unless the superdelegates step in and overturn the judgment of voters.




(The source for the pledged delegate total is MSNBC. Barack Obama's official estimate puts him even further ahead, but I've tried to rely on independent media estimates rather than campaign estimates. That being said, Obama's estimates have proven to be fairly accurate in the past.)

There are 611 delegates remaining to be selected, plus we have yet to learn the allocation of 48 delegates that have already been elected. Those delegates are mostly (if not entirely) from the Texas caucuses.

As you can see, we need to win 272 of these 659 delegates -- 41%.

Hillary Clinton needs to win 414 of them -- 63%.

That will be a nearly impossible challenge.

Clinton is trying to focus the media's attention on Pennsylvania, but as you probably know there are two contests before Pennsylvania: Mississippi and Wyoming, and both favor Barack Obama. 45 delegates are stake in those contests.

In fact, although Pennsylvania is the biggest individual state left, just 26% of the delegates left to be selected are in Pennsylvania. It makes for good TV to focus on Pennsylvania, but the cold hard delegate math tells the smart person that Pennsylvania is just one of many remaining prizes. For example, shortly after Pennsylvania, North Carolina and Oregon hold their contests and between them, there are more delegates at stake (167) than in Pennsylvania (158).

The reality is that the media coverage (and even my own blog coverage!) has been very misleading. By focusing on who won which state on Tuesday, they conveyed a sense that Hillary Clinton had won a major victory.

In truth, she really didn't. She's celebrating a layup in a game that she trails by twenty points with just a couple of minutes left in the fourth quarter.

Here's one way to measure that:

On Tuesday morning, Barack Obama needed to 43% of the remaining delegates to hit 1,627. Hillary Clinton needed to win just under 60%.

As of today, Barack Obama needs to win just 41%. Hillary Clinton must win 63%.

Every time that Barack Obama wins another delegate, Hillary Clinton's challenge gets harder. That's why even though she won a few more delegates than Obama on Tuesday, she really lost.

Convention Math: Remember the UADs!
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By - March 6, 2008, 10:35AM

A reader's comment on my last post sent me back to the ever-exciting topic of Unpledged Add-On Delegates (UADs). Those who have suffered through my previous explorations of the subject will recall that UADs are the forgotten superdelegates - the 76 bonus delegates awarded to the states. It turns out that they were dreamt up by Tad Devine in 1988, as a means of rectifying Jesse Jackson's gripe that he was winning states but only splitting their delegates. The original idea was that UADs would be awarded in each state as an extra bonus to the winner of the popular vote. Somewhere along the way, however, UAD allocation was largely divorced from the popular vote. Today, states follow a wide variety of methods for awarding their UADs (see my previous posts for more).

So who cares? Well, I do. And I hope you will, as well. But not, as best I can tell, the national media. The delegate calculators out there seem blissfully unaware of the UADs, lumping them in with the other superdelegates as if they're just sitting on the fence. Most projections I've seen do the same. This is problematic. To the best of my knowledge, only two UADs have been selected thus far, and so they're the only ones being included in most counts of superdelegates. But it's fallacious to think that the UADs will choose between the two candidates; rather, the UADs will all be chosen based on their public backing for one or the other. They don't fall into the pool of undecided superdelegates, and claiming they do makes that pool seem larger and more influential than it is - and, as it happens, makes a Clinton comeback seem plausible, when it's not.

Witness last week's fight over UADs in Alabama, one of the states in which the state executive committee makes the decision. Each campaign selected a single, loyal backer, and ran him as their candidate. Obama controlled six more votes than Hillary, and so his man won the slot. There was no sense in which this delegate was unpledged; in fact, he was vetted at least as carefully as any of the pledged delegates on Obama's slate. We're going to see the same in every state that awards UADs. Given that some of these will be awarded by a vote of a body whose composition is already a matter of public record - a state convention, the members of the DNConvention delegation - we can actually be as certain of these UADs votes as of those of their pledged peers, even if we don't yet know their names.

<snip>

So the states that have already held their initial contests award 62 of the 76 superdelegates. About half of those delegates have been or will be selected by bodies whose allegiances are already known, allowing us to predict that Obama will take 23 UADs to Hillary's 7. Obama's substantial lead in the category is based on two factors - he's won many more states, and more of the states he's won use caucuses or other processes that allow us to predict the selection of UADs.

Now, there are good reasons not to attempt to predict how the remaining UADs will be awarded. The Alabama fight demonstrates that the Clinton campaign isn't about to cede UAD slots even in states it lost, and if it's going to fight, it seems likely Obama's camp will, too. In some states, that's unlikely to matter. It seems reasonable to suppose that all 4 New York UADs will go to Hillary. But do Massachusetts' senators and governor have enough clout on the state committee to secure both of that state's UADs for Obama? Perhaps. And will Hillary's institutional support in states like Hawaii bring her a UAD where it failed to deliver a caucus? Could be. These things bear watching.

Nevertheless, it seemed a worthwhile exercise to award all 62 of these UADs by giving the remaining 32 to the candidates who won their respective states. If you do that, Obama wins them 38-24. That suggests what a headache the UADs are likely to become for the Clinton campaign if she stays in the race. As things stand, they widen Obama's lead by 16 delegates; and if things play out along the most likely lines, that lead would still stand at 14. (The remaining contests are likely to have about as much impact on the margins in the UAD battle as on those of the rest of the delegate tally - which is to say, little or none.) To put that in perspective, Clinton leads the overall superdelegate tally this morning, 241-198. Add in the UADs whose commitment have been determined, and that shrinks to 248-221. Even if she enjoys some success at grabbing UADs from states that Obama has won, she faces an uphill battle - almost all of Obama's likely UADs are already locked down, and almost all of Hillary's have yet to be determined. And to offset each UAD in that Obama lead, Hillary needs to win another pledged delegate or superdelegate to her cause.

So add this to the long (and lengthening) list of reasons why the numbers just don't add up for a Clinton nomination. And every time you see a tally of the 794 superdelegates, look closely to see how it treats the 76 UADs. These procedural details matter more than most people think - by mastering them, the Obama campaign has built a clear lead despite the remarkably even split between the campaigns at the polls.

Didn't pretty much everywhere in Ohio go for Hillary except the counties with big cities? As in, not just the PA border but the Indiana border and the West Virginia border...

Oh, talking about leads by county: wasnt Cleveland supposed to be one of the major strongholds for Obama?

He got 62% in Hamilton county (Cincinnati), 56% in Franklin county (Columbus) and 54% in Montgomery county (Dayton); and just 53% in Cuyahoga county (Cleveland).

That's a minimal win. And that even though Cleveland has a lot of blacks (29% of the Cuyahoga county population, and presumably significantly more of the Democratic primary electorate there) -- and according to the exit polls, blacks massively voted for Obama (87%).

So what, did Cleveland whites vote en masse for Hillary, in an almost South-like racialisation of the vote?

Apparently. And while I don't like to put racism as a reason for her winning, my associates in the place tell me that it's a highly polarized environment.

Cycloptichorn

The results of liberalism is now on display. To see all the graphs and analysis to prove so and so is racist or a sexist or whatever, this is delicious. [..] The Democratic Party created this mess of groupees this groupees that, and I think its about time it all came collapsing in on themselves.

call it demographics

Nimh, which counties are you looking for more info on? You mentioned about 12 of them.

And exactly what type of info are you looking for, demographics, voting trends, etc?