Oh, and its not "hundreds of thousands" of voters in NC.

Here's the stats from the NC SBOE website today:

Democratic: 2,622,596
Republican: 1,933,865
Unaffiliated: 1,242,195
Total: 5,798,656

http://www.sboe.state.nc.us/

During the first three months of this year, a little more than 165000 people have registered to vote in North Carolina. http://www.wdnweb.com/articles/2008/04/26/news/news01.txt

Part of the problem of the last few months has been Team Obama trying to play Team Clinton's game according to Team Clinton's rules. Barack and company should focus on winning North Carolina and Indiana because they're there for the taking. Delegate math is nice and everything (and I agree with the sentiment of the OP that lots of people are generally unaware of the delegate math), but people aren't voting on the delegate math. They're voting on the kitchen table, the gas tank, & the job search.

Besides... look how much good being the candidate of inevitability did for HRC!

Hey, Urbinato: lose the quotes in your name as it means people can't reply to you. (It's a bug in the TPM software I discovered a while back.)

As much as I hate sports analogies, I'll make one anyways: it's like a basketball game where the score is 110-100, with 30 seconds left on the clock before the game's over. You can call the score close if you like, but there's no way the team with a 100 points is going to win the game, or even tie it.

Get real, Obama supporters. Here are the facts:

The facts are these: Obama lost the latest primary, the polls show Clinton competitive against McCain, Clinton is scrappy, passionate, emotional, angry, full of soundbites, has Bill doing at least 4 campaign stops a day...

Accountants reading from spreadsheets won't convince voters that Obama is their man. He's got to go back to fighting like an underdog.

Everyone here wants to forget that the supers can change their minds at any time before the convention. If Barack can't change the tone soon, voter perception becomes superdelegate defection. While the almost-daily superdelegate commitments to Obama are barely mentioned by anyone outside the blogosphere, Clinton has become a master of yelling and screaming about even her completely manufactured leads.

Obama doesn't have to fight tooth and nail, he doesn't even have to draw blood. But his campaign needs to offer a whole lot more than acting like effing accountants.

Obama conceded on FOX that he will have to convince the super delegates of his electability.

Funny that you'd try this in a thread about the math.

It's true that he needs to convince enough superdelegates that, along with his pledged delegates and add-ons, he crosses the threshold needed for the nomination. But the details and (sorry) the math matter.

He's got a lead among pledged delegates. Because of the way the rules work he'll have a lead among add-ons. And he's cut Hillary's lead in superdelegates from over 100 a couple of months ago to around 21 or 22 now. But he needs to keep cutting into that superdelegate lead, and needs to continue to pull in some of the uncommitted superdelegates in order to win.

Now here's the math part that Hillary supporters hate so much. His lead in pledged and add-on delegates is projected to be so large, even in very optimistic scenarios for Hillary, that she needs to convince about eighty percent of the remaining uncommitted superdelegates in order to win. That's how far behind she is.

And how's she been doing lately? She's gotten 20% of the last ten superdelegates to endorse. (The Hillary campaign has taken to announcing add-on appointments as if they were the same thing, but a savvy person such as yourself won't be fooled by this kind of deception.)

And here's a key point: He's continued to pull in the superdelegates at a much faster rate than her even though the superdelegates have heard all of these arguments. Many of them have heard these arguments directly from Bill. But he's continued to pull in superdelegates much faster than Hillary even after her wins in big states. Even after hearing all of the demographic arguments.

Unfortunately they're probably also hearing why these arguments are bogus. This article by Josh is a good place to start, to perhaps get an idea of why these arguments have not (so far) had the sort of traction with superdelegates that Hillary needs.

Hillary supporters don't change the arguments, but they keep expecting that the same argument that hasn't worked yet will suddenly start to work, any day now. But maybe the problem is that the superdelegates understand why Hillary's extrapolations from primary results are bogus arguments. And if that's the case, then is making those arguments again, even if he loses Indiana (which seems very likely), suddenly going to have the opposite effect that it's had after OH, TX, PA and the rest?

The other thing you've got going against you is that the superdelegates will be under a great deal of pressure to wrap things up before the convention. So not only are the bogus demographic arguments going to have to start having a kind of traction with superdelegates that they haven't had so far, it's going to have to happen very quickly for it to work for Hillary.

It's not mathematically impossible for Hillary to win. It's just practically impossible.

Before Pennsylvania I was shouting....come on voters, see reality.
Hillary can't win without killing the party....you could have supported her a month ago, but now you need to help put an end to this by supporting Obama. Well, talk about deaf ears, I guess.
So, now, come on voters in NC and Indiana, please end this for the sake of the party and the country! More deaf ears, I suspect.

The Obama campaign (and we Obama supporters) need to get this through our heads: the super delegates' statements of support are NOT BINDING. That means each and every one of them can change his or her mind at any point. Again and again I read that Obama will only have to persuade about another 100 supers to switch to him, even if he does badly in the remaining primaries.

No. There are about 800 super delegates. Even if Clinton is 150 back in pledged delegates at the end of the primaries, she can win with a 475-325 split. If word spreads among the supers that Obama's lost his momentum, that he's unelectable, that Wright is too big an albatross, she won't have any trouble hitting that. Supers who endorsed him when he was riding high will have no compunction about switching to her.

Howard Dean today said that the obligation of the supers is to make a decision based on "electability," not the winner of the delegate count. No one in the Democratic leadership wants a candidate who backed in with a strong February but a bad March, April and May.

The super delegate count is meaningless. If he loses Indiana, he's in deep trouble.

I keep hearing people (Clinton supporters??) say that if Obama loses Indiana he is toast. How so? He will likely win North Carolina, Oregon, South Dakota, Montana and Guam. Clinton is likely to win Kentucky, West Virginia and Puerto Rico. Indiana may be trending toward Clinton, but it is still in play for either candidate, but even if it goes to Clinton by what may be a small margin it won't change the math.

One of the candidates also doesn't understand the reality of the delegate count. Women aren't as good at that math and science stuff anyhow.

The "truth" is that NEITHER delegate will get the minimum number of pledged delegates to settle it by that criterion. We are in a HIGHLY UNUSUAL situation. THERE IS NO MATH. The volatility of results forces the superdelegates to constantly update their opinions. This is not about electing Obama. This is about the winning of the White House by the Democratic party so that the efforts already engaged by Congress can move forward. Get out of the reality-tv-show mentality and take the process seriously.

OP -

You are very narrow-minded. It is not all about math. Obama is still in need of superdelegates. Imagine if Clinton did win each remaining state. Do you understand the reality of the situation? If she comes out with a win in the majority of the remaining contests, the superdelegates, who will vote with their conscience, will be hard-pressed to support her instead of the floundering Obama.

Contrary to Obama-supporter's claims, it's NOT all about the math until one of them reaches the magic number.

All last summer and even up until Iowa, Obama, in spite of being for months far behind in declared SDs and in polls, nevertheless handled his campaign with consistency and grace and far superior strategic deployment of his assets. The same cannot be said of Hillary and her campaign after her losses and her subsequent diminished status of coming in second by all metrics.

As someone said up thread, Hillary's only chance for the nomination is for Obama to stumble, and she is therefore doing everything possible to define him using terms which are false, unfair and contrary to the interests of a united and general election successful Democratic Party.

I think that Hillary is using democrats' anguish about a divide within the party to manipulate a whole lot of folks. That manipulation means a lot of folks are bending over backwards and at least pretending to humor her blatant goal post moving.... and it means they are giving her one last chance [TX, she lost delegates to Obama] and yet another last chance [PA, she hardly made a dent in the metrics] and yet another last chance [IN] and so forth. It is like Queen Hillary is wearing no clothes, but no one is willing to say so outright.

I think Hillary is not only willing to divide the party but is now invested in doing so in her sort of negative pleasure I-love-the-limelight scrappy self image promotion. Facing that in Hillary, I think that Obama is choosing to let this play out in a way that will least harm the party in the long run. It may be a lot more gentle for Obama's super delegates to declare a few at a time than it would be for his SDs to en masse 'end this now'. Hillary supporters would rush to declare that an unfair pile on.

Are you people retards or what.
Hillary has won the votes, in primaries and caucuses, of 15,112,000 Americans, compared to 14,993,000 for Obama. All this crap about Oilbama leading in delagates is meaningless as unless he gets to 2,025. This is a Democracy as much as Obamabots likme to pretend otherwise refusing to count whole states in their worship of their Hero, the popular vote is how this race will be decided. Now with Hillary is now ahead with the popular vote and Oilbama is sinking like a stone, to chicken to even debate.