Obama Needs Superdelegate A Day Under Current DNC Rules
Last night, Barack Obama clinched a majority of pledged delegates excluding Florida and Michigan, as well as under certain Florida/Michigan scenarios. But, in spite of a big win in Oregon and a well-executed speech in Iowa, the milestone did not quite produce the sense of euphoria and closure that his campaign might have been after. The circumstances of the day -- Hillary Clinton's overwhelming margin of victory in Kentucky, the late hour at which Oregon ballot boxes closed, the subdued tone of the evening necessitated by Senator Kennedy's diagnosis, and some relatively effective pushback from the Clinton campaign on the pledged delegate metric -- conspired to prevent that.
Obama might have another opportunity to declare victory on June 3rd, when South Dakota and Montana conclude the primary calendar. The conditions for doing so are otherwise pretty favorable. He is likely to achieve victory in one or both of these states (his worst case scenario is probably losing one of them -- more likely South Dakota -- by a small margin). And while Obama could conceivably hold a victory rally anywhere, there is a sound argument for doing so in Montana, a potentially competitive state that symbolizes the Democrats' 50-state strategy (think Brian Schweitzer and Jon Tester) and their hopes to expand the electoral map in November. But will the math be there to make Montana the state that puts Obama over the top?
FiveThirtyEight | May 22, 2008 11:30 AM