A Big Win in Pennsylvania, But Not Nearly Big Enough To Change The Math

Americans, schizophrenically, love two things: winners, and quixotic heroes who do great things in a losing cause. Last night in Pennsylvania, Hillary Clinton was both: the winner of what in an ordinary election year would be a tremendous victory, and the protagonist of an unequivocally lost cause.

Clinton won Pennsylvania. But in the national Democratic primary election overall -- and by that I mean the go-to-a-polling-place-and-cast-a-ballot part of the nominee-selection process -- Pennsylvania put the last nail in Clinton's hopes of winning anything resembling the popular vote or popular delegate count nationwide.

Before I go further, please understand: this post isn't about hating Hillary, but about math. It's no secret that I support Obama -- but I honestly can't help but admire any candidate who can win Pennsylvania by ten points (which, as of the time I'm writing this with 99% of precincts reporting, appears to be Clinton's margin of victory). It's a great victory in anyone's book.

Yet mathematically, Pennsylvania didn't move her forward; it actually put her further behind. That's what makes her win there tragic.

In a post the day before the Pennsylvania primary, I explained in detail what margins I thought Clinton needed in order to win the majority of elected delegates before the last primary election occurs on June 3. This election is like a footrace, I explained: with a relatively small handful of primaries left and a finite number of delegates remaining to be won, she needs to gain ground with every primary if she wants to make up the ground she lost in the first 40-plus contests.

Before Pennsylvania voted, Clinton trailed Obama in the elected-delegate count by 162. With only 566 delegates left to be won in the remaining contests, some fairly simple math showed that to catch Obama, she needed to win everything from Pennsylvania forward by 28 points - i.e., to win 64% of the elected delegates to Obama's 36% in all the remaining contests (with the exception of North Carolina, where she currently trails by 17 points; all my math asked her to do there was tie). Again, this is just math. Here's the algorithm: (Remaining delegates) - (Obama's lead in delegates) ÷ 2 + (Obama's lead in delegates). You can do the math yourself.

If she didn't win Pennsylvania (or any other primary) by 28 points, she'd only fall farther behind. If she won Pennsylvania by ten points, Clinton would actually have lost ground. In my post before the vote, I explained it this way:

Think of it like a hundred yard dash. Catching up to Obama after a ten point "victory" in Pennsylvania would be like standing on the starting line and expecting to win the race -- with your opponent having a 36 yard head start. Every step you take that doesn't gain you ground puts you closer to defeat. Every time Clinton falls short of the requisite 64% or 68% or even higher margin, the margin she needs in the remaining states goes up even more. Or, as Richard Durbin put it, Clinton is "running out of real estate."

Hillary didn't win 64% of the vote in Pennsylvania. She only won about 55% to Obama's 45% - the ten-point spread I predicted, about two-thirds short of the 28 point spread she needed. Accordingly, she'll only net about 16 delegates (87 for her, 71 for Obama) -- not nearly enough to change the race. After her win in Pennsylvania, Clinton now has to win 68% of the vote in all the remaining primaries -- up four points from the 64% she needed just two days ago.

In the real world, this is an insurmountable problem for Clinton. In some states, she may have had a little wiggle room; if she fell a little short in Indiana she might make it up by winning extra delegates in Puerto Rico. But Pennsylvania was Clinton's best shot at a big win in a populous state -- her "if you can't make it there, you can't make it anywhere" test (apologies to Sinatra). A month ago, a PPP poll showed Clinton leading in Pennsylvania by 26 points. Pennsylvania's primary came after the Reverend Wright and "bitter" brouhahas. Clinton has family in Pennsylvania; her father and brother went to school and played ball in Pennsylvania; she spent vacations in Pennsylvania; her grandfather taught her to shoot in Pennsylvania. And Pennsylvania has one of the last great Democratic political machines -- read this frustrated post by Chuck Pennacchio, a great Democratic candidate who lost a Pennsylvania primary because that machine was aligned against him, if you want a taste of how powerful the Pennsylvania machine is -- and that machine was overwhelmingly in Clinton's camp. If she couldn't make the requisite margin there, she won't be able to make it in state after state after state, without any major slips, from now until the end of the campaign. (In fact, even if Michigan and Florida were miraculously counted in Clinton's favor, she still would have needed 12 point wins from here on out -- but she fell short of even that lower standard. So not even Michigan and Florida could help her win the nomination democratically.)

No: Pennsylvania was her best shot, and she fell short. Hope is a wonderful thing, but no amount of blind optimism can change the reality: Clinton's not going to win the majority of democratically elected "pledged" or popular delegates. More broadly: no logical person can continue to argue that Clinton can win in any popular or democratic sense of the word; it's inevitable that she will lose the popular vote and the popular delegate count.

That doesn't mean she can't win the nomination. It does mean that the only way she can win the nomination is if the unelected superdelegates overwhelmingly and unexpectedly decide to disregard the wishes of their collective constituents and hand the nomination to the candidate who lost the popular delegate count (and the popular vote, and the majority of states).

Here's the important thing to take away from Clinton's win/loss in Pennsylvania: because she no longer has any realistic chance of winning the "election" phase of the nominating process, the rest of us need to insist that the politicians, pundits and prognosticators stop putting so much undeserved attention on the upcoming primaries, and focus instead on the single issue that could decide this election in Clinton's favor: the likelihood, the moral right, and the wisdom of allowing the Democratic Party's aristocrats to override the will of millions of Democratic voters.

Personally, I don't think it's likely, moral, or strategically wise for the supers to exercise a veto of the voters' choice. I think Obama has already won this election and will win the nomination and that Clinton's just the last one to realize it. But I also understand that many of her supporters disagree and feel strongly that it's both meet and proper for the supers to do whatever they want. I'm willing to agree to disagree on that question, at least for now; I don't really want to have that argument today, because it, too, is a distraction at this point.

Instead, all I'd like, from Clintonites and Obamanuts alike, is an agreement, based on simple logic, that the issue is no longer whether Clinton can win the election -- she can't, even if we count Michigan and Florida -- but rather whether she can, and should, win a contrary outcome via a superdelegate override.

Polls and predictions no longer count. Michigan and Florida, and Indiana and Puerto Rico and North Carolina and my own Oregon, no longer count, simply because their primaries can't realistically alter the outcome of the election. The only remaining issue is the propriety and wisdom of superdelegates overriding the voters. So let's talk about that from now on, instead of wasting time and energy on distractions that make money for CNN and MSNBC and play into the candidates' spin but aren't actually relevant to the decision that's being made.

Visit the author's blog, VichyDems

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Comments

[S1m0n]

Every time Hillary pulls out the stops and wins one ugly, as she did earlier in the New Hampshire & Ohio/Texas primaries, she has always immediately lost the next few contests, eroding any temporary gain in her position within a couple of weeks.

[Yansher]

I get your point and you are right on. Thank you this post.

[Independent voter]

FY hrc. you are a lying dog

[dawlishgal]

We are new to PA and we are simply staggered by the power of the corrupt Democratic machine out of Philadelphia. Rendell is OPENLY pals with Hsu, and he is brazen enough to pose for newspaper photos at the "retirement "party for a crony who is about to be endicted. Besides that, the Democrats lost a lot of votes in '06 (right before we moved here) when a bunch of them sneaked into the state capitol and voted themselves a great big fat raise.

Here in Pittsburgh, both the mayor and the country exec are machine pols. There was a promising decent-seeming mayorality candidate from the city council, but (of course) he failed to get the endorsement of the crooks from Philly. The boy mayor is a moron whose solution to the snow-plowing problem was to tell the public works department to plow his own street last (they had been plowing it first....which could certainly be rationalized, since he, as mayor, might be expected to show up in his office to handle other emergencies like the inevitable FLOODS) . As though the problem were PR instead of accumulating SNOW! He is the prototype of the silly yet ambitious pols here who have--to a man--been endorsing Clinton. Except for Bob Casey, and I have to give him credit for bucking the trend.

[bison1]

The news coverage has been less about the corrupt Democratic machine througout the state and more about Obama's money and twhite blur collar workers. The new politics entails dismantling political machines.

[patch61]

dont pissed off sen.hillary clinton get even because now they are going to try to pull all stops rock on and rock hard......­..........­....good luck in the next state you will win dont stop keep going to the end no matter what they say............

[Genna]

I read the 2006 PA Democratic Senatorial candidates's account of the machine politics. My question is what makes our party good when it pushes people out of the running like that?

It seems to me the logic in that posts cuts against either candidate. If people don't have access to the ballot or are pushed out because they are not the DSCC's pick, then why is the party as a whole worthy for our vote?

[JesusHC]

I honestly believe that at this point Hillary is in the race just to cripple Obama's chances in November. There's otherwise no sound argument for her failed campaign to keep going. It is quite scary to see what unchecked lust for power can do.

[M.S. Bellows, Jr. - Huffpost Blogger]

That possibility scares me some. There was a joke back during Bill's presidency. Bill tells Hillary, "you should be nicer to me. If you weren't married to me, you wouldn't be First Lady." Hillary answers, "You've got it backwards. If you weren't married to me, I'd still be First Lady and you'd be working in a gas station in Little Rock."

That old joke says something meaningful about Hillary's sense of entitlement. I don't doubt that she believes she deserves the Presidency as payback for helping Bill all those years, sticking by him, etc. How far would she go to make it happen? Would she really kneecap Obama to make sure he's not the incumbent in four years?

I'd love to hear other readers' thoughts on this...

[Independent voter]

You are exactly right. It's called the clinton 2012 strategy. If hillarious can get McCain to win in 2008, then 2012 will see the return of the hillary horror show

[bison1]

She makes the Democratic Party look silly.
Hillary is just not willing to do anything to win the nomination, to destroy the nominee, but she is also out to destroy the Democratic Party. She is angry with Howard Dean, over the Florida and Michigan Primaries, and the perceived disloyalty amongst party insiders. She never wanted Howard Dean to be the Chair of the DNC. She needs the Florida and Michigan primaries She despises having to pander to these super-delegates. She will destroy the party rather than let nomination go. . She clearly understands that she is creating schism within the Party. She is building her base, not the Party’s base. The Clintons may creat their own party.

[hrayovac]

bison 1--I can tell you from my exposure to a few little inner workings in the DEm party you're right but for the last point. The Clintons don't have ten years to form their own party. The DLC is functionally dead, and yes, Howard changed a lot---- for the better. Her base is paper thin, having only nostalgia on their side. And nostalgia for a certain era will be overshadowed by the next president..'08 and '12--Obama!

[Gould123]

Don't know why they can't get the point spread right! Clinton won by 8.9% in pennsyvania. there's a runor of more delegates getting on Obama's wagon. Any one know about that? Has any one heard about Clintons going to court in Los angelos April 25,08? Heard they getting sued for fraud! Is this a joke article? maybe people hasn't seen how abc poll droped drastically from that rotten debate! So you have any idea what would happen to the demacrtic party if they gave this nomination to Clinton? They would quickly lose the financial base Obama build up! Although Dem's say they will begrudgly support Hillery if it came to that, they are certainly not saying they will give her their hard earned money! there is a difference! than you must look at the independent votes going to obama, they don't have any pledge to vote Demacrate------so we'll probally lose them! Than it would polorize this party if Obama losst! They've heard for months that Hillary cannot win , so they are ready or getting ready for that to happen in their hearts and minds! but, Obama is the clear winner here! We all know that and if he's disenfranchised along with those accross this country supporting him--------It would destroy this party, and whats happening to abc in loseing viewers, will quickly happen to dem's voters!