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Posted
Friday, April 11, 2008 6:12 PM
| By
Christopher Beam
One advantage of the 2008 Primary: Director’s
Cut: Extended Edition is the opportunity to learn every last minutia
of the Democratic nomination process. What used to be a complex, impenetrable
system no one had time to examine has now become a complex, impenetrable system
we have way, way, too much time to examine.
Under the microscope today is a group of superdelegates
called add-on delegates. The 76 add-ons are unbound,
just like other superdelegates. The difference is that they’re not named until the
spring, when the states hold their conventions. Most states have just one
add-on delegate, but some bigger states have more. (Pennsylvania,
for example, has three; California
has five.) Each state has a different process for selecting add-ons—sometimes
the state party chair picks them, sometimes it’s a committee, sometimes an
entire convention. If you’re curious, DemConWatch lists
when and how each state picks.
So although you can’t predict their behavior perfectly,
there’s at least some logic behind
which way the add-ons swing. For example, California
state party chairman Art Torres says
he plans to pick the state’s five add-ons proportionally according to the
primary results—three for Clinton,
two for Obama. In Washington,
D.C., where Obama won
overwhelmingly, one add-on has declared
for Obama and one is still undecided. In states with only one add-on, the
delegate is likely to go to the candidate who won the state. That’s why Clinton won
Arkansas’ single
add-on delegate. In general, the add-ons seem to break down roughly according
to which candidate won where.
So here’s an experiment: What happens if each of the states
that haven’t yet selected their add-ons pick proportionally according to the
primary results? (For the sake of argument, we’ll go with ABC’s prediction
yesterday that Clinton wins Pennsylvania,
Indiana, West Virginia,
Kentucky, and Puerto Rico, and that Obama wins
Guam, North Carolina,
Oregon, Montana,
and South Dakota.)
In states that have more than one delegate, we split them roughly proportionally.
For example, each candidate gets one of South Carolina’s
two add-ons; likewise, each gets two of New
York’s four. In Pennsylvania,
we’ll give Clinton
two and Obama one.
In this scenario, of the 63 add-on delegates that have yet
to be selected, Obama gets 35 and Clinton
gets 28. Factor in the add-ons who have already declared their allegiances, and
Obama gets 41, Clinton
29. (Another five have been selected, but not yet announced whom they’re
backing.) In other words, it’s likely the add-ons will split in Obama’s favor,
or at worst roughly 50-50.
The takeaway point being that the superdelegate
wall we discussed yesterday is even
higher if you take the add-on situation into account. Seeing as the add-ons
are likely to favor Obama, Clinton
needs even more than 70 percent of the remaining uncommitted superdelegates
(our ballpark prediction) in order to reach 2025. One Frayster, “Independent Don,”
crunched the
numbers (an excellent post I encourage you to read) and concluded that if
the two candidates hypothetically split the remaining pledged delegates 50-50, then,
given the likely allocation of add-ons, Clinton would need to win a whopping 90 percent of the remaining 230 or so superdelegates
to get the nomination.
It’s not often we use the word
“impossible” around here. But it’s starting to look like there is no other way to describe Clinton's chances.
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