I just want to clarify my position, and I'm going to hang off Bionic's well-positioned to do so.

Some people have read me as saying that Clinton will drop out soon after May 6th. I was not and don't believe that she will.

Others have read me as saying the math shows that a Clinton win is mathematically improbable, which is true but not the point.

This post isn't about the math. It's about the story. In order to convince people that she's still a viable candidate, she needs a plausible story about how she can pull this thing off. Since March, her story has been that she can win the popular vote, get MI/FL counted, and convince enough superdels to vote for her. It's a reach, but imaginable.

After tomorrow, that story falls apart. What the math shows is that she won't be able to win the popular vote. So she needs a new story. Unfortunately for Clinton, there aren't any more good stories. If she were to be nominated without the pledged delegate count or the popular vote, or by some theoretical "nuclear" option, there would likely be riots in Denver and a civil war within the party. I can't see how it's reasonable to expect 70% of uncommitted superdelegates to sign on for that.

I'm sure that she can convince some people, but without a plausible story for her path to the nomination, there will be important voices--pundits, superdelegates, party leaders--who will stop taking her candidacy seriously. Because their voices affect the race itself, there will likely be a snowball effect where what they say makes her story even less plausible, creating more doubt among other voices.

Her campaign is in some ways ingenious, and perhaps they'll come up with a new plausible story that hasn't occurred to me. But I don't think that they have any stories left in their playbook.

Let me reconcile that false contradiction for you, George.

We are going to advocate Puerto Rican statehood, and with it, the right of Puerto Rico to receive electoral votes.

This is consistent with our crusade for Guamanian voting rights, which I ask you to view and recommend:

http://tpmcafe.talkingpointsmemo.com/talk/2008/05/our-campaign-for-guamanian-vot.php

I'm Bill Clinton. Clearer now?

You're either kidding or paranoid, man. Wright will wait until after IN and NC.

It seems more likely that we've become trapped in a Groundhog-Day-esque scenario in which it's always the *next* contest which is pivotal.

Thing is, there are no more pivotal contests. No room for momentum, no firewalls, no possible hail Mary's. The sum of the delegates in the remaining primaries isn't much larger than the sum of the May 6th delegates. And popular vote after May 6th (not including PR) is smaller than the popular vote on May 6th.

In short, I'm glad that you left the "How I learned to stop worrying and..." part out of the title.

An oversight. A shame because it would have improved the tittle.

I agree about the superdels trickling in and lowering the percentage. I didn't put them into my projection because it's not really projectable.

I think the "nuclear" option is outside the realm of possibility. It would "blow up" the party even more surely than the superdels voting en masse for Clinton.

The first step is acceptance

Maybe for a day. The thing is that we're so close to the endgame that I expect the pundits to take a hard look at Clinton's options, harder than they have to date, and they won't see a lot room for movement.

I apologize for another football analogy, but think about how a sportscaster reacts to the end of game with one team far ahead. As long as he can, he'll milk it for excitement, speculating about what the losing team might do to come back and getting excited when they complete big plays. But eventually, you reach a point in the game when the losing team cannot realistically come back, and talk of hail mary's and onside kicks starts to seem silly. So then the sportscaster switches modes and starts talking about the inevitable result and what the winning team did right and what the losing team did wrong and what an historic game it has been.

I expect that to happen after Tuesday. The pundits will see that there are no longer any big plays that can get Clinton the nomination. The last "big" primary day is May 20th, and it's half the size of May 6th, so it's not big enough to get excited about, and then there's nothing of importance after it. That is to say, Clinton could conceivably still score one last touchdown on May 20th, but she's down by too many points for it to matter. So not seeing an option to get excited about, the pundits will switch over to postmortem mode. They'll start discussing her strategic mistakes and Obama's incredible successes, and they'll begin looking forward to the general election. After all, the primaries are just the division championships. We still have the superbowl to look forward to.

And unlike a football game, what the pundits say can actually affect the race. They'll start using words like "presumptive nominee" and talking the about Obama-McCain matchup. Clinton's attacks will slide into the background. As people internalize her inevitable loss, they'll stop donating, and the superdelegate holdouts will feel more comfortable endorsing Obama, which then encourages more "the end is nigh" talk from the pundits, and so on.

As the talk switches to Obama-McCain, her only option to continue to command the spotlight will be to, as you say, turn Brutus (or Judas?). But I don't see her doing it. Not because of her scruples but because there's nothing in it for her. Poisoning Obama's G.E. campaign won't make her the nominee, and it would burn a lot bridges with other Dems. She's a politician, and she still has a long career ahead of her, so it would be very bad for her to be seen as a spoiler.

Did you mean from?

Thanks, Chrono. The difference is that there are no PA's left. It was improbable before, but she still had a story about how she'd get the nomination. That story is done after tomorrow. (I elaborate on this in my first comment upthread.)

Yeah, everyone's been talking about that. It wouldn't even matter unless Obama were to 0 dels out of MI, which won't happen.

Bottom line, the party is extremely unlikely to engage in any shenanigans that would result in the perception that Obama had the nomination stolen from him. No one wants riots in Denver.

drw:

Here's some advice--never trust ANY politician. Verify, verify, verify. If I could express one theme in this campaign, it would be that I was from the start and remain unable to understand how so many folks could come to the conclusion that Senator Obama is something other than a politician. I am not being critical; my three voting age kids feel this way and, believe it or not, I still love them (depending on what happens in Indiana of course).

YOU'RE going to be there?

AND Genghis's electric kool-aid technicolor shirt?

Ah man! I'm going to be in Fairfield... Dunno if I can afford the gas tho. Maybe if I cut out beer for a week or two.

:(

math schmath

Yes, I've sold out to the dark side. I feel dirty.

If Obama wins both tomorrow, he shall be the nominee. If Clinton wins both tomorrow, then Obama is in serious trouble, regardless of the math. That's politics. Then the decision has to be made, and it's a tough one--which portion of the base are you going to let down and possibly alienate?

If Clinton were to win both tomorrow, she would still need about a 12 point average spread in the remaining states, depending on the margin, just to get the popular vote. The pledged count is simply out of range without MI & FL and Obama getting 0 delegates from MI.

If Obama has the pop and the pledges, it's not a question of who gets let down. Clinton supporters would be let down. Obama supporters would be enraged. Picture tens of thousands of rioting college students and African-Americans in Denver. How would your Obama supporting kids react?

If she were to win both tomorrow, I could see, through a series of upsets and landslides in the remaining primaries, a path for her to get enough votes for a Clinton nomination not to result in a repeat of the '68 convention, maybe. If she doesn't win, there's no path that does not involve Obama losing the nomination despite winning the pledged delegates and popular vote, and that path is a dead end for the party that I can't see the super delegates choosing under almost any conditions.

Half of us support Hillary Clinton, and Billy Glad and me aside perhaps, we ain't all nuts.

Billy Glad is nuts, but that's got nothing to do with his Clinton support. But it's not just Clinton supporters in any case. IMHO, there's some serious probability misassesment going on among worried Obama supporters as well. Millions of people play the lottery even though it's a really bad investment, statistically speaking. It's not insanity. It's just a poor calculation.

My point in the blog is 1) to lay out why it's a poor calculation, and 2) To argue that the long odds will start be more apparent after tomorrow (even if Obama loses IN, which I inspect him to.)

Finally, if I show up tomorrow night will I be the only Clinton supporter in the house???? I ain't giving Obama a penny unless and until he's the nominee dude!

I definitely hope that you come. The only organization that you'll be expected to give money to is the bar. You will most likely be the only Clinton supporter. The event is posted at my.barackobama.com, so if it's anything like the last time, the bar will be full of the drunk young Obama supporters that workerbee fears, and there will almost certainly be heckling during Clinton's speech. Otherwise, it's mostly people hanging out and chatting. (Just want to set your expectations honestly, but I do hope you come.)

Randy -- when you hit "reply", you should see a little checkbox above the comment field labeled, "In reply to [Name]". The only bug I've come across where that breaks is when you hit "reply" and then sign in; in that case, the site loses your "reply-to" information, and you have to back and hit "reply" again for your comment to be properly threaded. If you are seeing the reply-to checkbox and you are checking it, there's something else going on.

so she's got the white blue-collar primary vote? So what? Obama's won all the big cities!

Okay, I was being a bit snarky, but having written it, I do think there's something to this line of thought. The delegate math supports Obama's having a geographical advantage as a candidate, as well as an arithmetical. If we take the Clinton line of thought on the geography of voting to its logical conclusion, it's clear that Dems win the most votes in the most densely populated areas. This is why delegates are allotted the way they are - more delegates for more densely Democratic areas.

So while Clinton might have won bragging rights for taking the state of Pennsylvania on the whole, she didn't come out that far ahead in delegates because Obama trounced her in Philly. This is why her "big state" argument just won't hold water - she's won the "big states" by winning large swaths of those states that don't necessarily include the Democrats' strongholds. Obama, on the other hand, tends to win the actual "Democratic" parts of the states he wins, as well as the Dem strongholds of the states he loses. Obviously there are going to be exceptions (I mean, come on, I am *way* too lazy to do a county-by-county analysis for every primary to date), but on the whole the math and the geography tell the same story.

That's why the "white working-class" meme is such b.s. Obama is *not* going to lose solid Dem territory to McCain. He's got a different, but much broader, coalition of "swing" voters than Clinton's wwc. But to expect that she's going to carry largely Republican rural areas in the fall is just silly - much sillier than thinking that Obama can turn red states blue. Here's why: it's hella easier to turn out your supporters in a few concentrated areas than in a lot of dispersed smaller pockets. So if Obama can carry (for example) the urban centers of NC, he'll win the state. Clinton could (for example) carry all the rural votes in Arkansas and still lose.

That's why Obama's delegate strategery hasn't been just a smart primary ground game. Throughout all of this horrible slogfest, he's also been laying the foundation for the fall. And winning those highly concentrated delegate regions means he's been solidifying his grassroots base in key Democratic districts all over the country. It's a good thing, even when he's lost the state as a whole.

Yes, every vote matters. And yeah, I'd like to see him improve with that demographic. But ultimately, I still feel that he's made the right decisions in allocating his time and attention - because it's not just about the primary. (Thank God!!)

I've always gone along with the race factor, but something else just occured to me; I've read elsewhere that Bill Clinton won only 37% of the white vote in '92. If that is correct, it seems to me, then, that white blue collar resistance to Obama may not be entirely about race, although since they're voting for Hillary Clinton, it's hard to say that it's about class either. Could it be resistance to change? Resistance to anything unfamiliar, perhaps. At any rate, good news is, if Clinton could make it then with only 37% white vote (I've got to verify this) while running against an incumbent President, Obama needn't worry about it that much in the GE. With certain unprecendented youth participation mostly favoring him, he's sure to come in with more than 37%, and with AA participation equally guaranteed to reach unprecedented levels, there's probably far less reason to worry about the so-called white blue vote in November. I could be wrong but the thought is worth mulling over.

Exactly. And the SD's have been cowed by the big money Clinton backers who are threatening to take their ball and go home if Hillary doesn't win. That also infers that most of the SD's on the fence are Obama backers. If they were for Clinton, why would they hold back? She could use all the help she can get to keep this fiction alive. I expect that after Tuesday's primaries the trickle of announcements will turn into a flood. Obama could clinch by the weekend.