Hillary Clinton may have beaten Barack Obama in the Pennsylvania primary, but it increasingly appears that she can’t beat the political math in the race for pledged delegates.
If current polling data in Indiana and North Carolina hold true for those May 6 contests, Clinton would have to capture 80 percent of the vote in the six subsequent primaries to surpass Obama in the hard delegate count.
Averages posted by the political Web site RealClearPolitics give Obama more than a 15-point advantage in North Carolina and a three-point lead in the Hoosier State. A slightly less rosy outlook for Obama in those two states would require Clinton’s percentage for the rest of May and June to jump to 70 percent.
Even under a worst-case scenario for Obama, such as one in which he were to lose in North Carolina by two percentage points and Indiana by nine points, close to the margin he lost Pennsylvania by, Clinton would barely dent his current lead of 156 pledged delegates.
She could only get ahead of him by garnering 68 percent of the vote in every remaining contest, something she has done once this entire primary season, and that was in her former home state of Arkansas.
“That’s just not realistic, given the demographics of these states,” said veteran Democratic strategist Tad Devine, who is not connected with either candidate.
Six primaries remain after Indiana and North Carolina, including Kentucky, West Virginia and Oregon. “Certainly she has a big lead in Kentucky and West Virginia, but aside from that, he’s either ahead of her or it is a really close race,” Devine said.
Last week, Clinton used her Pennsylvania victory to bolster her argument that she can win large swing states necessary for the party to prevail in November.
But the Pennsylvania win didn’t get Clinton far in the pledged delegate race. She picked up an estimated seven delegates, and her statistical chances of victory actually diminished because the pool from which she can draw support has shrunk as the primaries come to a close.
“The Clinton camp has done an excellent job of creating this sort of false notion of what a victory is,” said Indiana University political science professor Lawrence J. Hanks. “What she wants to do is keep pushing this whole idea that she’s viable and making the argument that he cannot carry the white rural vote.”
But that argument has its limits, Hanks said. “The major barrier she is going to find is she can’t overtake him, yet she has to make the argument that he is not electable. And that will be a hard sell.”
