A Christian Liberal is NOT an oxymoron.

Posted by XT on April 23rd, 2008 in Campaign News

The delegate counters have been updated to reflect the post-Pennsylvania delegate totals. Every day the picture gets a little bit clearer. Some day it will stop looking like mud.

At this point, there eight primaries and a caucus left. Guam holds its caucus on May 3 and awards four delegates - so don’t expect anyone to notice. Indiana (72) and North Carolina (115) hold their primaries on May 6. West Virginia (28) votes on May 13. Kentucky (51) and Oregon (52) have their say May 20. Puerto Rico (55) has a primary on June 1. Then Montana (16) and South Dakota (15) wind things down on June 3. That’s a total of 408 remaining delegates.

By my dubious math skills Barack Obama needs only 306 delegates to lock up the nomination. Hillary Clinton needs 133 just to catch him. With only 408 delegates to win by vote, Clinton’s chance of winning outright is somewhere around the odds of my high school basketball team winning the NBA championship. On ice skates.

So the big prizes that await are, in descending order of delegates: North Carolina, Indiana, Puerto Rico, Oregon, and Kentucky. Among these states, a total of 345 delegates will be determined. Mathematically, he could lock it up by taking all of those delegates - but that’s practically impossible. At this point, he has picked up 51.7% of all delegates and, out of 2668 pledged delegates, 53.1% of those awarded via electoral contests. Don’t look for him to out-perform his history drastically through the end of the primary season.

That would give him 216 out of 408 delegates. 90 delegates short. Damn, that hurts! Can he convince 90 more super-delegates to go with him?

It seems stupid to even ask that.

So let Florida and Michigan count. They aren’t going to change this anyway. If anything, they’ll give Obama at least the six delegates he needs to sew up the nomination.

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