This is a two-part post. In the first half, I'll try to give a decent overview of how the contest stands this morning. In the second, I'll offer my thoughts on what's likely to happen over the next few weeks.
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A week ago, I offered a conservative estimate that by this morning, Obama's pledged-delegate lead would stand at 152. Last night, he turned in impressive victories in Hawaii (projected at 14-6) and Wisconsin (projected at 43-31). Add those preliminary results to the 138-delegate lead his campaign presently claims, and the gap swells to 158 pledged delegates.

There are 981 pledged delegates remaining (plus seven votes from Democrats Abroad that will be announced "shortly.") To overtake Obama, Hillary now needs to win 570 of them, or 58%. Let me be blunt: that won't happen. To take 58% of the delegates against a candidate who dominates heavily-black districts, Hillary would need to take better than 60% of the remaining votes. She'd need to clean up in the caucuses in Wyoming, Guam, and Puerto Rico. She'd have to win big in states with large black populations like Mississippi and North Carolina, and in rural states like Montana and North Dakota. And every time she fails to win 58% of the delegates, the bar gets moved a notch higher.

So I'll repeat my conclusion from a week ago - for all intents and purposes, the race for pledged delegates is over. Done. Finished. At this point, it's not even realistic for Hillary to believe she can tighten the margin to the point where its significance is questionable. So where does that leave her on this Wednesday morning?

Well, she still holds a lead among the superdelegates. For the first six weeks of the year, Hillary and Obama gained endorsements at a roughly equal rate. After routing Hillary in the Potomac Primary, Obama managed to cut Hillary's lead from about 100 down to about 80, where it's stood for the past week. Despite all the gloomy predictions, Hillary's support among the superdelegates remains impressively strong. Relatively few have rescinded their endorsements, and she's still gaining new backers at a decent clip. The problem she faces is that more than a few of her backers have made it clear that although they may be prepared to tip a genuinely split convention in her direction, they don't intend to overturn a clear majority of pledged delegates. So even holding on to that lead, and building it back up to the point where it could tip the convention in her favor, seems unlikely to be enough unless she can make the case for a split result.

That brings us to the popular vote. Obama tacked on 194,000 votes to his margin there last night, putting his total lead a hair over 900,000. Even counting Michigan and Florida, Hillary trails by almost 300,000 votes. It's possible that she could erase that smaller margin in two weeks, but any lead is likely to be fleeting, given the remaining contests. In fact, it seems most probable at this juncture that Obama will ultimately lead in the popular vote no matter how one cares to tally it - with or without caucus states, with or without Florida and Michigan.

There's a new and pernicious argument floating around the blogosphere, to the effect that Obama has been winning the popular vote on the strength of his support from independent and Republican voters, and that the appropriate method of measuring victory is to count only the votes of Democrats. On its surface, that's not an entirely unreasonable claim - the Call to Convention itself makes clear that the Democratic Party would prefer if only those who choose to register with the party were able to cast ballots. But there are three problems with this argument. First, it's yet another effort to change the rules in the middle of the contest. Various state laws mandate access to the polls for those not registered as Democrats, and the candidates have campaigned accordingly. This would have been a different race if the rules stated, at the outset, that only registered Democrats counted. But more importantly, these zealots rely upon exit polls to assemble their tally, which leads to two related problems. Exit polls ask about partisan identification, not registration - a significant percentage of respondents will offer an answer that reflects their present commitments, and not the formal record of their registration. So you'll find registered independents who tell the pollsters they're Democrats, and (far more commonly) registered Democrats who tell the pollsters they're independents. To illustrate: Hillary's home state of New York held a closed primary, meaning that only voters formally registered as Democrats participated. But only 87% of those registered Democrats self-identified as Democrats when approached by the exit pollsters. Even more disturbingly, we're talking about polls here, not formal tallies. They include margins of error, like all surveys - and in this case, the size of those margins renders any putative lead insignificant. Not to mention that their samples may not be representative, nor their models accurate. That's why we go to the trouble and expense of holding elections, instead of just asking Gallup or Edison to tell us who's going to win.

Hillary is now trying to make a case using a hybrid of these various arguments. She has a new site up this morning, that argues that the proper measure of this race is how close a candidate is to reaching 2,208 delegates. That's counting Michigan and Florida, and adding pledged delegates to superdelegates. The site overstates its case - for fun, let's choose a few examples. There are not "over 1000 delegates at stake" in the remaining contests - either superdelegates are free to ignore the results of the elections in their own states, or they're not "at stake" in the remaining elections, and fewer than a thousand delegates remain. You can't have it both ways. When the site claims that "neither candidate can secure the nomination without automatic delegates," it's engaging in the same (reasonable) projections that it slams the Obama camp for making; technically, an Obama sweep could still deliver the nomination outright. The claim that Hillary wasn't expected to win the states where she prevailed (Her victory in Oklahoma was "not expected"? In the only state where Obama didn't advertise because he rated his chances too low?) is risible. And though the site claims boldly that "there is a clear path to an overall delegate majority," it doesn't bother to detail it. That's because the clear path involves Obama winning a decent majority of pledged delegates, and Hillary relying on a lopsided vote among the superdelegates. For all its bluster, the Clinton campaign would rather not trumpet that fact. But the basic claims made by the site are these:
1) There are two kinds of contests: "primaries where millions vote" and "caucuses where thousands vote."
2) Florida and Michigan deserve to be counted.
3) Superdelegates have every right to provide the critical margin at the convention.

We'll see whether any of those arguments gain significant traction. Certainly, they'll be discussed and debated - this race has propelled cable news ratings into the stratosphere, and like play-by-play announcers late in the fourth quarter, the anchors and the pundits will start pulling out obscure precedents, dusting off improbable comebacks, and constructing unlikely scenarios to keep their viewers engaged. The problem is that, at the end of the day, the only audience that really matters at this point in the race is the superdelegates. And to date, every shred of public evidence suggests a profound reluctance even among many of Hillary's current supporters to be seen as overturning the popular will - and that's not counting the hundreds who remain on the sidelines.

Where does that leave the race? More in the second half of this post.

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