Math time
Obama crushed Clinton in the Potomac last night, winning DC with 75 percent of the vote to Hillary’s 24 percent; Maryland 59 to 36 and Virginia 64 to 35 percent. These are cheerful numbers if you’re an Obamaphile, and they spell trouble for Hillary unless she can eke out a win in Wisconsin or capture both Texas and ohio.
Over on World Sports Exchange, where you can buy and sell $100 futures on presidential candidates, Obama is selling for $71 and Clinton is at $24. What this means, in betting terms: For Obama, you risk $71 in order to win a $100 contract, or in other words, a profit of $29. So you’re risking $71 to win $29. In practical terms, then, Obama is more than a 2:1 favorite over Clinton that this point. For Clinton, you risk $24 to win $100, in other words, a gain of $76 if she pulls it off. To turn this into odds, it’s $24/$76; Hillary is a 3 to 1 underdog. These numbers obviously don’t match up because World Sports Exchange has to make a profit somewhere. But what it means is Obama is somewhere between a 2:1 to 3:1 favorite to win the Democratic Nomination.
According to NBC News, Obama has 1128 delegates and Clinton has 1009. This number is not including superdelegates, but the political wisdom here dictates that superdelegates will be hard pressed to line up behind a candidate who has a minority share of “regular” state delegates. In other words, if we get all the way to June and Obama has a 250 delegate lead on Obama, those 796 superdelegates will probably all throw their support behind Obama, rather than alienate the Democratic base by picking Clinton just because the party insiders like her more.
These all important superdelegates will also be swayed by which candidate has a larger share of actual votes gained from the electoral contests thus far. According to MSNBC’s blog First Read, Obama has 9.4 million votes so far, or 50 percent, while Hillary is at 8.7 million, or 46 percent. If you add in the votes of Florida and Michigan, whose delegates were stripped by the national party after they held their primaries before February 5 in violation of party rules, Obama has 9.94 million votes and Clinton has 9.86 million, or a 47 to 47 percent tie.
So in other words, Obama is ahead no matter whose numbers you go by. The general buzz this morning on political blogs is this race is Obama’s to lose at this point, unless Hillary sweeps Texas and Ohio by comfortable margins. In that scenario, the fight goes all the way to the convention and the two candidates get to bicker over whether Florida and Michigan get their delegates back and superdelegates decide who to throw their support to and John Edwards plays kingmaker and hands off his 26 delegates to the winner in exchange for the vice presidency. Fun for us, not so fun for the Democratic Party.