My point has merit because what you have not seen is a large movement of superdelegates in any direction. Particularly since PA results have been slightly in Obama's favor, but the spin-free way to describe it is that there has been a steady trickle of superdelegates on both sides.
You seemed to get on the defensive without realizing that I was not making a case for any candidate in particular.
Today Obama is +5 on superdelegates.
And Obama will still lose NC and IN on Tuesday. So much for the supers.
Plus, supers who are being pressured by Obama are going to come out for Hillary.
Dean asked for this. Be careful for what you ask for.
Who are these supers that are going to come out for Hillary?
Are they imaginary?
I remember having a previous impression of your not being able to read or have a mature conversation. Enjoy your trolling today. :)
is not denoted by disagreement. It's a serious charge and deserves to be leveled on someone other than an apparent Obama supporter disagreeing with an apparent Clinton supporter.
a paragon of logic and rationality in these discussions. Yet I never see anything from you suggesting that you comprehend that Obama's significant lead in pledged delegates matters to an almost decisive extent.
If the candidates split the remaining pledged delegates down the middle, Obama will need 87 PLEO endorsements to get over the top, and Clinton will need 223. Clinton got @ 53% of the PA pledged delegates with an approximate 10% margin of victory. Even if she were to achieve that margin of victory in the remaining contests and obtain 53% of the remaining pledged delegates, that would only increase her number of pledged delegates by 11. In that case Obama would need 98 PLEO endorsements to get over the top.
You also drastically underestimate the pressure that will be brought to bear upon Clinton once Obama receives these endorsements. He needs 30% of the remaining undeclared PLEOs. If he doesn't get them before June 3, he'll get them shortly after. At that point if Clinton doesn't bow out she'll confirm the party-wrecker label she's being branded with.
It's been awhile since I've seen it, but aren't some or all delegates free to vote however they want after the first ballot?
I'm not saying it will matter this time out, but I seem to remember that from the hazy past when watching conventions was actually interesting.
Technically, though, 'pledged delegates' are precisely that. They have pledged to vote a certain way. This doesn't always mean they vote that way. I'd guess this is particularly true for SDs and not so much for the regular delegates.
If anyone has the rules handy....
Delegates functioned a bit like as representatives back in the day. Officially they're chosen to make sure that the views and preferences of the people that voted them in are effectively represented. And they are free to do that in any way they chose to make sure their constituancy is represented to their fullest.
Nowadays that means the presidency mostly and the platform fights of yore are long gone. But officially the party convention is there to decide on all party matters of which the nomination is just one.
Since '72 the new delegate selection rules make that the nominee presumtive is in effective control of the delegates as the primaries make sure that people that are loyal to him are elected. However, as far as the national party is concerned that loyalty is mostly personal and up to the delegate himself.
As far as I remember the requirement to vote for the candidate on whose slate you ran on first ballot is a rule made at the state level by some and not even all. The actual realistic punishments for faithless electors is pretty much nill though regardless of the rules.
That's why the delegates are vetted as they are by the campaigns. And if you look at other countries that feature elections according to slates it's actually a quite dependable way to be sure of ensuring a straigth voting line from a delegation. So it's extremely unlikely to see large shifts in pledged delegates if any.
This is all from memory though so I might have misremebered here and there, so take it all with a piece of salt.
If he wins NC, should she leave the race then?
If she wins NC, should he recognize that he's lost a lot of support even in his traditional demo mix and step aside for the good of the party?
I don't think he should, but neither should she. Obama supporters are the ones hand wringing over the destruction of the party--there was a poll on that the other day, wasn't there? Clinton supporters are not really worried. Probably because as a group, they have more experience in following and participating in politics by dint of age alone.
I know I've seen much more fractious nomination battles than this and everyone seemed to live. Sometimes the nominee wins the GE, sometimes not, just like any other scenario.
IF Obama lost both NC and IN then there might be a discussion point. In fact if he did lose both then I would say there is merit in discussing a forced joint ticket. Barring that this thing is over in a few weeks. Which is good, it gives Clinton enough time to raise the money needed to pay off her debt.
And +5 is a trickle.
If you look at a chart of the superdelegates committing, Hillary opened a huge lead back when she was inevitable (100+) and Obama has been eating away at it ever since voting started.
There is no sign of it changing or slowing down.
let's see what happens next week.
in fact, let's see what happens in the next 35 days.
we can all argue about it, but it won't change anything. it's not in our hands. we're spectators.
gut feeling, the supers lag the public in terms of trend and changes thereof. as is usual with politicians. the public trend is away from obama and toward clinton, but this will have to continue for more than a week to penetrate the supers' skulls.
if it doesn't continue, obama is a lock. if it does, you may see very quiet defections. if you hear about them at all, in public. politicians hate to look like they made a knee-jerk mistake before the facts were in.
If in fact there is a serious trend away from Obama toward Clinton, the superdelegates are in a bit of a pickle, because they know the party is screwed if they promote the second-place primary finisher to the nomination. The only exception I can see would be if something truly devastating came out about Obama. One may or may not believe that devastating things have already arisen, but I would suggest the polling disagrees.
But we may just as quickly see a reversal of the polling in the next few days, which may accelerate next week if Obama wins NC and comes close or wins in IN. There's nothing like inevitability to help poll numbers.
And as for these polls, we're still six months from the election. Remember where everything stood six months ago? It's amazing to me how much has occurred and how much has changed. And there's more to come!
IF Clinton has clearly gained the momentum, winning IN and maybe NC (or losing by a whisker), then winning pretty big in the next couple of weeks..
IF Obama's national Dem and electoral college-related poll numbers continue to fall, even moderately...
Then you might see the party elders take him aside and promise him a wonderful future with the party if he just steps aside and says the trend looks disappointing and he cannot escape what he feels is an untenable position....blah, blah.
Any negative news stories about him or his judgment regarding past associates would only exacerbate the need.
Big ifs, I do say, but not as impossible as they seemed a few weeks ago.
But for Obama it's far more significant, since he needs but 30% of the outstanding PLEOs to lock this up.
Since this whole thread is about whether the magic number metric will catch on, I suggest that this is the other new metric. "Hillary is now only +N." or "In a turn of events, Hillary is now all the up to +N."
It neatly encapsulates the superdelegate battle, and uses small numbers.
