It’s nearly impossible for Hillary Clinton to win more pledged delegates than Barack Obama, but can she still win the nomination? Yes, she can. Here’s what her path to victory might look like.
To reach a nominating majority of 2,025 delegates, Clinton would need to win about 540 of the 957 delegates still up for grabs. Of this total, 611 are pledged delegates–to be allocated in the 12 remaining state primaries and caucuses; 346 are still-neutral super-delegates–the party honchos who are seated at the convention but not elected by the voters and can back whomever they please. (I’m relying on the Real Clear Politics estimate of still-neutral super-delegates.) The more pledged delegates Clinton wins in the remaining contests, the fewer super-delegates she will need. For example, if she wins 51 percent of the remaining pledged delegates, she will need 66 percent of the remaining super-delegates.
But if Clinton is to have any hope of the super-delegates’ going 3-to-2 in her favor, she will need an impressive win in the Pennsylvania primary on April 22. A 10-point margin of victory might do it–adding 200,000 votes or so to her total haul in the primaries, which would put her within striking distance of Obama’s lead in the popular vote. If you include Florida, where both candidates were on the ballot but did not campaign because the state was stripped of its delegates for breaking party rules, Obama currently leads the popular vote by less than 300,000 votes. Depending on the results from Mississippi’s March 11 primary, Clinton would need to gain about 100,000 to 200,000 votes throughout the May primaries in North Carolina, Indiana, West Virginia, Oregon, and Kentucky to pull ahead.
While the Democratic nominee will ultimately be determined by the convention delegates, winning the popular vote would give Clinton a compelling claim that super-delegates should ratify the will of the voters–an argument that would fall on friendly ears in a party still aggrieved that Al Gore lost the Electoral College in 2000 despite winning the popular vote. “Imagine a split in the popular vote and the Electoral College–only this time the Electoral College does not have the Constitution conferring upon it moral legitimacy,” writes Jay Cost of Real Clear Politics. “Which count will people prefer?”
Clinton will be able to make her case not only to super-delegates but also to the pledged delegates, who are bound by honor but not by party rules to vote for the candidate to whom they are “pledged.” A memo from the Democratic National Committee (DNC) that was circulated to reporters reads: “A delegate goes to the convention with a signed pledge of support for a particular presidential candidate. At the convention, while it is assumed that the delegates will cast their vote for the candidate they are publicly pledged to, it is not required.”
The two campaigns will therefore scrap for every last delegate, pledged or not. A senior Clinton official told Politico in February that “as we get closer to the convention, if it is a stalemate, everybody will be going after everybody’s delegates.” However, veteran Democratic consultant Tad Devine says, “Based on my experience working the delegate operations for three presidential campaigns . . . I think there is almost no likelihood at all of [pledged delegates] changing from one candidate to another.” Of course, no two candidates have ever arrived at a nominating convention evenly matched.
At the very least, the ability of pledged delegates to switch sides might create enough uncertainty to send the nomination battle to the convention floor, even if Clinton is behind by 100 delegates after all the primaries are over (the last contests are the Montana and South Dakota primaries on June 3).
The Democratic race certainly has plenty of twists and turns left. Some states have not yet elected their slates of pledged delegates. And we still don’t know the identities of 76 of the super-delegates. How is that possible? Under DNC rules, 76 super-delegates–more than the combined elected delegates from Iowa and New Hampshire–are designated as “add-ons,” to help the Democratic delegation meet inclusion goals for “African Americans, Hispanics, Native Americans, Asian/Pacific Americans and women,” as well as “members of the LGBT [Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender] community and people with disabilities.”
It’s not clear who will win this “quota primary.” The “add-on” super-delegates will be determined between now and the end of June by state party committees, committees of pledged district delegates, or state conventions. DNC spokeswoman Stacie Paxton says that “it’s up to the state parties to determine the unpledged add-on delegates,” and the issue of determining an “add-on” super-delegate’s presidential preference is not addressed by DNC rules.
A nomination battle that has been fought along lines of gender and ethnicity could culminate on June 1 in Puerto Rico where 55 delegates are at stake–more than the combined pledged delegates of Wyoming, Montana, and South Dakota. Though Puerto Rico’s governor has endorsed Obama, the territory is over 80 percent Hispanic and Catholic, demographic groups that have favored Clinton this year. It was announced just last week that Puerto Rico would switch from holding June 7 caucuses to a June 1 primary, with delegates apportioned proportionally. This diminishes the chance that Clinton could run the table as, say, Obama did in Idaho on Super Tuesday, when he won the state’s caucuses 80 percent to 17 percent.
Still more wild cards: There will be a detour on March 15 back to Iowa, for another round of caucusing, which will help determine who gets John Edwards’s delegates. And then there are the two jokers in the pack: Florida and Michigan were stripped of their delegates for breaking DNC rules by holding their primaries too early. They voted anyway, and Clinton won both. Neither the DNC nor those two states seem willing to foot the bill for multimillion-dollar do-over primaries, but in all likelihood there will be a re-vote if the race remains tight into late spring.
With so much up in the air, Clinton could easily take her case to the floor of the Democratic convention in Denver this August. In 1980 Ted Kennedy fought all the way to the convention to see if he could flip enough of President Carter’s delegates, even though he was trailing by an overwhelming margin. With solid wins in the remaining primary states, Hillary Clinton could pull within 50 delegates of Obama and somehow win over the super-delegates she needs. Stranger things have happened.
John McCormack, a Collegiate Network fellow, is an editorial assistant at THE WEEKLY STANDARD.
