Trailhead: A campaign blog.

Racing Against the Finish Line

Ever since Barack Obama started racking up primary and caucus wins after Super Tuesday, analysts have summed up Hillary Clinton’s prognosis with an odd statistic: the percent of the vote she needs in every remaining primary to catch up in pledged delegates.

Going into tonight, that margin was just over 69 percent. Based on current estimates for Indiana and North Carolina, by tomorrow morning it will be close to 85.

I should hasten to point out that this statistic has always been mostly meaningless since some states have many more delegates than others. But it’s a convenient way to express an ugly reality for Clinton: the longer this race goes on, the less time and fewer delegates she has with which to catch up.

One could argue that this is an unfair statistic; even the Clinton camp doesn’t argue that they can catch up to Obama in pledged delegates, and we’ve long surpassed the point where Obama could clinch the nomination even with 100 percent of the remaining vote.

But the statistic does remind us of this: The high-water mark for Clinton has risen after every contest, even after a win. After Obama won D.C., Maryland, and Virginia, she needed about 57 percent of the remaining vote; after March 4, it was 63 percent. Even when she picked up a net gain of 12 delegates in Pennsylvania, the mark inched up by a fraction of a percent, to 69. The finish line has simply outrun her.

Exit Polls 101

Exit polls out of North Carolina suggest that Obama has won the state by about 14 percentage points. While CNN does not report the overall percentages for each candidate, we can divine them by weighting the demographic breakdown between the candidates by each demographic’s turnout. For example, here’s the exit poll data for gender: 

From here, we deduce:

Clinton = (40% of males) * (43% male voters) + (42% females) * (57% female voters) = 41 percent of the vote

Obama = (56% of males) * (43% male voters) + (54% females) * (57% female voters) = 55 percent of the vote

We can do this for any of the exit poll categories and we’ll get similar results. 

Accord to Slate’s Delegate Calculator, a 14-point win for Obama in North Carolina will grant him a 66-49 advantage in pledged delegates in the state for a net gain of 17. Clinton netted 12 pledged delegates in her nine-point win in Pennsylvania, though it’s worth noting that the estimates of pledged-delegate leads are more likely to shrink than grow as the results from individual districts are reported.

If, however, Obama does end up posting a win in North Carolina of this magnitude, he is well positioned to at least cancel out the progress in delegates Clinton made in Pennsylvania.