Democrats Marching Towards A Nominee
Sanders needs many more wins like Utah to stop Democrats from marching towards a nominee not named Hillary Clinton.
Bernie Sanders won the states of Utah and Idaho in the fourth Super Tuesday of this Democratic primary. Bernie won 67 delegates while Hillary won 51 delegates. What does the nomination look like now?
Democrats Marching
There are 4763 total delegates in the Democratic Primary. Of those delegates, 4051 are allocated by the popular vote percentage won in each state primary, and 712 are super delegates who can vote any way they want. A total of 2382 delegates is necessary to win the primary.
Of the delegates allocated by vote percentage, Hillary has won 1182 of them with 8,903,899 votes. Bernie has won 893 delegates with 6,344,463. That is a 2,559,436 vote advantage in the popular resulting in a delegate advantage of 289.
To get to 2382 delegates allocated by the popular vote, Sanders needs to win 1489 of the remaining 1976 remaining delegates (75%). Hillary needs to win 1200 of the remaining 1976 delegates (61%). She’s won 1182 of the 2075 delegates awarded thus far (57%).
If she maintains her current pace, Hillary would win 1126 more delegates putting her at 2308 delegates, 74 short of the necessary 2382. The super delegates are the soldiers marching Democrats towards the presidency.
Of the 712 super delegates, 467 have already declared for Hillary Clinton while 26 have declared for Bernie Sanders. Including them brings Clinton’s current delegate count to 1681 and Bernie’s to 937 when including delegates allocated to both candidates from Democrats abroad, America Samoa and Northern Marianas.
Including these pledged delegates would mean Hillary only needs 701 of the remaining 1976 delegates allocated by the popular vote (35%). Bernie would need to win 1445 of the remaining 1976 delegates (73%).
Nothing much changed after last night. Bernie still needs to start winning 70% of the delegates to gain adequate momentum to convince super delegates to change their mind and vote for him. The logic is that these super delegates will change their mind because of momentum that still leaves him short of Hillary in allocated delegates from the popular vote.
Bernie had a good fourth Super Tuesday by conventional standards; however, he only won 57% of the delegates. This is far short of the number he needs to win the primary. We see Democrats marching towards a nominee, and Bernie is running out of time.
