10 9...8...7...6...5...4...3...2...OBAMA!!!

Delegates:	Pledged	Super	Total	Needed
Obama	1,749.5	358.5	2,108	9
Clinton	1,624.5	288.5	1,913	204
Remaining	31	177.5	208.5

(2,117 delegates needed for victory)


*The numbers changed while I was posting - the fat lady is about to hit the high note!

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.

The Finish Line Has Moved - 64 To Go

Delegates:	Pledged	Super	Total	Needed
Obama	1,724.5	328.5	2,053	64
Clinton	1,586.5	290	1,876.5	240.5
Remaining	86	205	291
(2,117 delegates needed for victory)

177 To Go

177 to go.



My phone was ringing off the hook last night from friends and acquaintances who know I am up to my ears in the minutiae of this primary.

"Why hasn't she dropped out yet?"

"What more do they want from him?"

"Why isn't this thing over yet?"

"What trick is the Clinton Camp going to pull next?"

For people who don't follow the political goings on in their own town, for those who could normally care less about the national political scene "because they are going to do what they want anyway", this is a harsh introduction to watching big time politics. There are so many conflicts within the Democratic Party right now - young versus old, black versus white (will come back to this one in a minute), the future versus the past, the many versus the few - that it will take a while for all of these things to settle down.

I wouldn't want to imagine being Hillary Clinton right now. This would have been an easier pill for Obama to swallow - remember, as he puts he, he wasn't supposed to get this far. But to be the front runner, the favorite, the one to beat - to already know what changes you were going to make in the White House bedroom to get rid of the stuff you didn't like the last time you lived there - it has got be one of the most horrible political and personal experiences a candidate has gone through in generations, somewhere up there with the"Wilkie Wins" headline THAT presidential hopeful went to sleep on.

I've told my friends to turn their TV's off - to go do something fun, or get some sleep, or reconnect with their families, or whatever it is they normally do to kill time - because everything else from here on out is just noise, mindless chatter to fill the airwaves until the conventions.

And for my more conspiratorially minded associates, I've had to reassure them that there will be no secret ballot, no "stealing" of the nomination, no magic wand that will help her snatch victory from the jaws of defeat.

Rest easy, I've told them - Barack Obama will be the Democratic nominee. "You can take that to the bank."


177 to go.

183 To Go

183 to go.



That’s the number I stayed up until three o’clock in the morning ON A WEEKNIGHT to find out. That’s the number of delegates of any variety – pledged, super, rocky road, mint chocolate chip – that Barack Obama’s campaign needs to be able to plant the flag of victory at the Democratic National Convention later this year.


If you watched the Hillary Clinton victory speech in Indianapolis last night, you saw what I saw – a woman who was going through the motions as she spoke, her voice hollow, her posture limp, her eyes vacant as she willed herself to recite the meaningless campaign rhetoric to a crowd who could barely fake the listless level of enthusiasm they showed. Her husband’s face was red, his crimson cheeks and cherry colored forehead much more revealing than the professional politician’s innocuous smile he wore as she droned on about her will to win, her resolve to stay in the race, and her need, now more than ever, for more money to continue her odyssey towards the nomination.


I was on the phone with my brother as she spoke, spinning an alcohol-induced conspiracy theory about the lone county in Indiana that was refusing to report ANY vote totals as we got closer to midnight. I stopped in mid ramble – “Dude, this sounds like a concession speech – let me call you back!” – as her halting words came through the speakers. I didn’t need the detail of high definition TV to see her in a way the majority of the political commentators tried desperately to avoid describing accurately.



183 to go.



I think in a lot of ways it is harder for those of the pundit class to accept the fact that Hillary Clinton has absolutely no chance of earning – I’ll say it again here, EARNING – the Democratic nomination as the candidate the party will back for the presidency of the United States of America than it will be for the man in the street. These people have had to face the thing that the rest of America has been able to avoid up to this point – that in November, if you want to support the Democratic presidential candidate, you will be touching that screen or pulling that lever or checking that box for a man with brown skin.


If its still hard for me, a confessed political junkie these past few months, to deal with the enormousness of a black man who is one step away from being the president of this country, I know it must be three times as hard for those who have always expected to be led by someone who looks like them instead of someone who looks like me.



183 to go.



The Clinton campaign has canceled Hillary’s round of post primary public appearances on TV and radio that were scheduled to begin in a few hours. If you heard what I heard in the tone of Hillary Clinton’s voice as she claimed victory for the Indiana primary, you would recognize the sound of a woman who is wondering what just happened.

I know the feeling myself.

Although the campaign I ran for student body president of my high school almost twenty five years ago was not in the same league as a presidential bid, the dynamics were similar. I was the favored candidate, with lavish red, white and blue trimmed campaign boaters my supporters fought over, professionally rendered campaign posters, a slick slogan, and access to the school intercom as a voice behind the morning announcements. My opponent was a girl from across the tracks who was never organized and always late to everything.

In a student body of two thousand students, I lost by twelve votes.

The student council advisor was almost in tears. “I counted them three times,” she said to me. “I’m sorry.”

I had been so sure of victory that I had worn one of my campaign boaters to her office. How could I have lost? What went wrong? Who the hell were the thirteen idiots who couldn’t see that I was the better candidate?

After the anger faded I was embarrassed, ashamed that I had thought so much of myself, and humiliated by the thought of being beat by someone with less advantages on her side. It took awhile for me to see the things I’d done wrong. The things I’d ignored. And to understand that I had put more faith in symbols, like campaign hats, than the kind of substance that could make a few more students believe.

Mrs. Clinton has lived in another world, one that some have dubbed HillaryLand, for the past fifteen months. Emerging from the confines of this cocoon will be painful. It will be embarrassing, even though she will try not to show it.

She will survive.


Meanwhile, the O-Man will continue on his quest – on our quest – to be seated behind the desk in the Oval Office.


No red, white and blue trimmed Styrofoam boaters required.

This Is Not A Horse Race

One of the fallacies that has been propped up by our main stream media journalists for the last month and a half is that this primary is still a horse race. What almost all of them conveniently ignore is the tremendous amount of energy, time, money, and an improbable shift in the actual demographics of the remaining states that would be needed for the Clinton campaign to garner more than the 50% total of the outstanding pledged delegates she is projected to get based on current state by state estimates.

Which is why if you are unfamiliar, as most Americans are, with the way delegates are actually accumulated through the proportional vote totals of individual congressional districts, we are more likely to think of the way a sporting event is scored – that Clinton COULD upset Obama if she could “run the table” in the remaining contests.

But “running the table” – Obama having no net gain in delegates – is impossible. He would have to get less than twenty percent of the vote in each of the remaining states for Clinton to get within spitting distance. Most of the larger congressional districts out there have 4 to 6 delegates at stake. 62.5% of the vote in that district is needed to go from 2-2 or 3-3 to 3-1 or 4-2. In order to blank an opponent, the opponent has to have a vote total that is below the threshold needed to gain at least one delegate, which is usually 15%.

The thing that is maddening to me is that every journalist in the country who is on the political beat or is a political columnist sees this kind of information about each states primary delegate allocation methodology all day every day. Yet their headlines suggest that Obama is hearing Clinton’s footsteps as she gains on him.

These are the numbers as of yesterday, which is already off when you include the guy below for Obama:

Clinton is 430 delegates short of the 2025 needed to nominate and has to capture 62 percent of the 408 pledged delegates yet to be selected and the 286 superdelegates yet to commit in order to get there.

Obama needs just 295 delegates of any stripe to close it out.

295.

That’s it.

There are 191 delegates at stake over the next 6 days (May 3rd and May 6th). From where we stand right now, Obama looks to pick up 95 – 100 of them.

In the 14 day stretch after that (May 20th), there are 131 delegates at stake. From where we stand right now, Obama looks to pick up 55 – 60 of them.

There are only 86 pledged delegates left to fight over between May 20th and June 3rd. From where we stand right now, Obama looks to pick up 35 – 38 of them.

If you add 95, 55, and 35 – the low end of the estimates – you get 185, which puts him 110 delegates away.

In this scenario, Clinton gets the balance of the 408 delegates outstanding – 223.

If my math serves me correctly, from where she is right now, this would put Clinton 207 delegates away – only a hundred delegates but twice as far from the prize.

Something tells me there are more than 110 superdelegates who are wearing an “O-Man” t-shirt under their dress shirts. There are a lot more people who will be ready to get to the end of this thing, like the guy below, in the next two weeks.

110 and counting.

Math Any Ten Year Old Can Do

I was just on the phone this morning with a friend here in Atlanta. I’d called her to inform her about the recent death of a young man we both knew, because we hail from the same town in South Carolina. It turns out she happened to be home this weekend, and had just found out herself. She was actually in the process of getting ready to go to the funeral when I called.

“Yep,” she exclaimed, “I know it’s got to be hard on his daddy. I guess I need to go sit in the church today. For his father.”

We traded a few remarks about the dead son. We spoke about the funeral, and where it would be held.

“You know the pastor can’t let you leave a funeral without making sure he’s taken you there,” my friend said. “He’s going to preach to us until he thinks we’ve got the spirit.” In the next breath, she brought up the controversy with Reverend Wright, Barack Obama’s pastor. “Speaking of pastors – how long you think they’re going to keep our boy on the ropes with this thing?”

I proceeded to talk about what the lack of diversity in the places that matter in America really means – that the overly homogeneous press corps we want to rely on as a Fourth Estate who represent ALL of our interests seem to only attend white churches. If there were more than a token amount of minority journalists and news reporters in this group, I asserted, maybe we would see some stories about kinds of churches she and I grew up around, where preachers understood that their job was to entertain as well as enlighten in order to maintain and grow their congregations.

She asked me if I thought it was a death knell for Obama – if the loss he was anticipating in Pennsylvania would put Clinton back in the lead.

“BACK in the lead? Lead of what?” I practically shouted into the phone. I proceeded to tick off the facts – “math any ten year old could do” is actually how I put it – that strongly suggested that this race would end up after the North Carolina primary the same way it did after the Texas/Ohio contests – with no net change to either candidate of delegates won, and no net change in the number of actual votes – now standing at 700,000 – by which Obama was leading Clinton.

“You need to turn that news off,” I continued, “and just use the links I send you to keep an eye on the raw numbers. If you listen to these people in the media, they will have you believing that 9 is greater than 10. That 1246 is greater than 1414. That 12.5 million is greater than 13.2 million.”

She laughed. “I see your point.”