Will Obama get 25 superdelegates by Tuesday?

My man Nate Silver at FiveThirtyEight.com has been working overtime to keep up with poll results from Puerto Rico AND the elusive magic number of delegates needed to lay claim to the Democratic nomination.

Jim Clyburn intends to announce on June 3.
Deb Kozikowski intends to announce by June 4.
Jimmy Carter will endorse after the primaries conclude.
Margie Campbell, who had one false start and had to retract on technical grounds, will become official after Montana ends.
Maria Cantwell has endorsed Clinton, but says she will endorse whoever gets 1705 pledged delegates.
Denise Johnson says she will endorse whoever gets 1705 pledged delegates.
Chris Van Hollen says he will endorse whoever gets 1705 pledged delegates.
Christine Pelosi says she will endorse whoever gets 1705 pledged delegates.
Nancy Pelosi says she will endorse whoever gets 1705 pledged delegates.
Donna Brazile says the RFK remark made her "numb," that she will quit the Democratic Party if the superdelegates decide the party's nomination, and there is only one way they can do that.

BONUS DATA LINK: Nate also does a superb job of mathematical sleuthing to uncover a discrepancy between the threshold of 2118 delegates being bandied about by the talking heads and the actual number of delegates that exist as of today in his piece "Is 2118 the Magic Number?



Delegate Update, Post-Puerto Rico

The news orgs haven't called all the pledged delegate allocations in Puerto Rico, but here's what it looks like:

Dist 1: 2; Need 25.001% for 2 of 6, Obama's got 28.09% with 98% reporting
Dist 2: 2; Need 30.001% for 2 of 5, Obama's got 30.88% with 100% reporting
Dist 3: 1; Need 37.501% for 2 of 4, Obama's got 30.38% with 100% reporting
Dist 4: 1; Need 37.501% for 2 of 4, Obama's got 31.23% with 100% reporting
Dist 5: 1; Need 37.501% for 2 of 4, Obama's got 29.10% with 100% reporting
Dist 6: 1; Need 37.501% for 2 of 4, Obama's got 33.74% with 100% reporting
Dist 7: 1; Need 37.501% for 2 of 4, Obama's got 35.29% with 98% reporting
Dist 8: 2; Need 30.001% for 2 of 5, Obama's got 34.73% with 100% reporting
PLEO: 2; Need between 21.43% and 35.71% for 2 delegates, Obama's got 31.59% with 99% reporting
At-large: 4; Need between 29.17% and 37.50% for 4 delegates, Obama's got 31.59% with 99% reporting
Total: 17

Obama Pledged Delegates Before Today: 1709.5
Edwards Pledged Delegates for Obama: 16.5 (includes 4.5 Edwards per Chuck Todd)
Superdelegates: 330.5
Guaranteed Michigan add-ons per yesterday's deal: 1 (2 people, half votes each)
Pre-Puerto Rico Total: 2057.5

Majority: 2117
Needed: 59.5

Puerto Rico pledged for Obama: 17
Needed: 42.5

Donna Edwards is running to replace Al Wynn in Maryland-04 a majority-minority, heavily gerrymandered Democratic district, and with her election the needed to win number goes up by .5, but Obama gets a full delegate, thereby making this number essentially 42.

A one-vote win in South Dakota gives Obama 8 delegates.
A one-vote win in each half of Montana gives Obama 9 delegates.

Needed superdelegates before Tuesday night so that the primaries put Obama over the top: 25

In the next 48 hours, will Obama get 25 superdelegates to declare publicly?

Here's what we know about 10 specific supers:

Jim Clyburn intends to announce on June 3.

Deb Kozikowski intends to announce by June 4.

Jimmy Carter will endorse after the primaries conclude.

Margie Campbell, who had one false start and had to retract on technical grounds, will become official after Montana ends.

Maria Cantwell has endorsed Clinton, but says she will endorse whoever gets 1705 pledged delegates.

Denise Johnson says she will endorse whoever gets 1705 pledged delegates.

Chris Van Hollen says he will endorse whoever gets 1705 pledged delegates.

Christine Pelosi says she will endorse whoever gets 1705 pledged delegates.

Nancy Pelosi says she will endorse whoever gets 1705 pledged delegates.

Donna Brazile says the RFK remark made her "numb," that she will quit the Democratic Party if the superdelegates decide the party's nomination, and there is only one way they can do that.


Hmmm...Senator Obama appears to have 1732.5 delegates (unofficial total) as I write this, which means he is their man.

Puerto Rico Updates

Another frequent poster at DailyKos - actually the proprietor - has posted this "on the ground" look at how things are going in the Puerto Rican primary today. The "list emptying" Ricky Rossello refers to in his recap sounds like something you used to hear about stateside in the old days, when TV was in black and white and ballots were on paper.

Anyway, this is as close to live info you are likely to get - even given the fact that the source is a Clinton supporter, he doesn't really have a reason to spin the results at this point, and its more info than you could get from Wolf Blitzer and company if you watched them all day today.

Puerto Rico updates

by kos

Sun Jun 01, 2008 at 11:25:10 AM EST

I'm getting reports from the island from Ricky Rossello, son of former Gov. Pedro Rosello and vice-chair of the Clinton campaign in Puerto Rico.

First, his thoughts on how districts are expected to perform:

San Juan (district 1), Bayamon (district 2) and Carolina (district 8) -- should be very strong Hillary Clinton posts.

Guayama (dist 6) and Mayaguez (dist 4) should be more in-line with Obama.

Ponce (district 5) and Arecibo (district 3) will be curious to watch, because Ponce is a typical Obama Hotbed, but most of the mayors in the region support Hillary, while in Arecibo, the opposite is true. It will be interesting to see how much political muscle these mayors have.

Humacao (district 7) should be interesting to watch because there have been serious reports of "list emptying" -- a dynamic that occurs in Puerto Rico, when electoral representatives from one side are not present. This practice consists in taking the whole list of voters who did NOT come in but were registered there, and signing them up as if they voted. In the general election, this happens, but with an 81-85% turnout... the impact is significant but may be minimal. However, on a primary where the maximum expected turnout is 30-34%, one or two of these may be significant enough to swing a district one way or the other.

That 30-34 percent mark was interesting, since I know the Clinton camp has been hoping for a massive turnout from the island's 2.4 million registered voters to pad their (rather irrelevant) "popular vote" argument. 30 percent wouldn't put enough votes in play to make a significant impact on that metric (which now is even more confusing given the results of yesterday's Michigan compromise).

As of 10:30 a.m. local time, turnout in Puerto Rico was around 20-25 percent, lower than usual, but that's being chalked up to a possible "church effect". Just got an update:

Turn out has increased now (as of 12:15) in the [San Juan] metropolitian area; an expected stronghold for Clinton. I am on the base now, but will go out and drive through the different polling places, and give you my thoughts on that as well. Will call for the other districts too -- update you in 30-40 mins...

Update: Al Giordano's predictions:

The Field projects that Clinton will win 62 percent to 38 percent for Obama [...]

36 pledged district delegates:

District 1, San Juan: Obama 2 - 4 Clinton
District 2, Bayamón: Obama 2 – 3 Clinton
District 3, Arecibo: Obama 2 – 2 Clinton
District 4, Mayagüez: Obama 2 – 2 Clinton
District 5, Ponce: Obama 2 – 2 Clinton
District 6, Guayama: Obama 2 – 2 Clinton
District 7, Humacao: Obama 2 – 2 Clinton
District 8, Carolina: Obama 2 – 3 Clinton

Update II: Rossello sends another update:

Turnout is getting significantly high in Bayamon and San Juan... Long lines. Caguas (Part of the Humacao District 7) is having problems... I suspect you will hear about voter fraud there (read the blurb about list emptying). Some polling places only have representatives of one candidate in this town.

Report from Ponce coming shortly.

Update III: Rossello:

Ponce (Dist 5) Turnout is high -- But consolidation of polling places may drive confusion. No notion if it favors hillary or obama yet.

Remember, Ponce is an Obama stronghold, but with pro-Clinton mayors. So we'll have to wait until votes are counted to see if the mayors' political clout has trumped the electorate's leanings.

Puerto Rico Voters Will Lay Low On Sunday

Back to basics.

While the drama of who will receive how many delegates from Florida and Michigan gets underway today, Puerto Rico gears up for its primary tomorrow. Their polls are open from 8 am to 3 pm.

My man Nate Silver of FiveThirtyEight.com gives us his take on what the voter turnout is likely to be:

And as such, taking the high and low end of the range, we'd estimate that somewhere between 34.7 percent and 64.0 percent of Puerto Rico's 1.27 million "likely voters" will actually turn out to vote. That would represent a turnout of between 441,000 and 813,000.

Puerto Rican officials expect a turnout of about 500,000. Joe Sestak, who might be echoing the expectations of the Clinton camp, says 450,000 to 500,000. Puerto Rican elections expert Manuel Alvarez-Rivera guesses 600,000. The record for turnout in a Democratic primary is 870,000, when Ted Kennedy made a visit to the island in his challenge to Jimmy Carter.

The word around the internet is that the electorate in the PR will be less motivated to get out and vote for a variety of reasons, including the obvious one – this thing is pretty much over already.

“Traditionally people in Puerto Rico see the primaries as something far removed from their political reality,” said Angel Rosa, a political science professor at the University of Puerto Rico at Mayaguez. “They don’t see this primary as any kind of opportunity to send a message to the United States.”

Nate Silver’s number crunching turned up an interesting phenomena, a sort of Get Out The Vote Catch-22. One of only things Clinton has left to talk about is the “popular vote”. Although it has always been an irrelevant statistic in the Democratic nomination process, it is a concept that seems to have become popular with the public after the 2000 general election meltdown in Florida. In order to get closer to Obama’s popular vote tally, Clinton needs to have a net gain of hundreds of thousands of votes in the last three primaries. Puerto Rico presents her best chance of gaining large numbers of votes. However, as Nate says below:

Moreover, there may be something of an inverse relationship between turnout and Clinton's performance. The GQR poll says that Clinton's margin is 19 points among likely voters, but only 13 points among all voters.

So if Clinton wants to maximize her percentage of the vote, she might hope for a lowish turnout. However, Clinton not only needs to maximize her percentage of the vote; she also needs to maximize turnout.

Basically, it looks like Camp Clinton finds itself entangled in a Gordian Knot, better known as the Democratic primary system. The harder they pull against it, the tighter the party rules Clinton's top advisors spent the last ten years perfecting are going to choke their own campaign.

The good thing is, the folks at Camp Clinton only have four days left to torture themselves (and us) - the last primary will finally be over Tuesday night once Montana and South Dakota close their polls.


Hallelujah!