It is pretty shocking just how close Tuesday’s results show this race to be.  Obama’s net lead over Hillary went down by approximately 4 delegates, 4 delegates which the Obama camp quickly countered by announcing 4 new superdelegate endorsements.  After the results on Tuesday there actually are a few things we can say with certainty about the Democratic race:

1. Michigan and Florida will scramble to hold new contests
2. Superdelegates will decide the eventual nominee

Michigan is already rumored to be scheduling a caucus, something which will almost certainly upset the Clinton camp.  When Michigan’s Democratic party violated DNC rules when it held it’s contest before the Feb 5th deadline the candidates pledged not to campaign in the state and withdrew from the ballot.  Despite this, Hillary decided to place her name on the ballot so of course ended up beating second place “Uncommitted” although not by as large of a margin as one would have hoped for a candidate who was the only name on the ballot.  The Michigan caucus will likely go to Obama in a big way like essentially every other caucus has so far.

Florida’s non-Jeb Bush governor, Charlie Crist, has announced that the state is willing to finance a Democratic primary that will actually count in the Sunshine State.  In FL things are a little bit different, it wasn’t the state dems that chose to move the primary before Feb 5th, it was the Republican controlled legislative assembly and governor. FL will probably go for Clinton still.  Ultimately adding MI and FL will not greatly affect the delegate count, my prediction is that it will maybe give Obama a net gain of around 5 delegates.

The next two states to vote are Wyoming and Mississippi, both of which will presumably go to Obama by fairly large margins.  This will net him a few more delegates over Hillary, but then comes the 1 month break which would have been a momentum killer even if Obama had kept any momentum from his previous 11-in-a-row streak.  Pennsylvania is being billed as the last large state, and will probably go marginally for Hillary, but North Carolina isn’t a small state and will most likely have the effect of balancing out Pennsylvania.

Of course, these predictions only hold assuming the candidates don’t have some horrible Dean Scream/Macaca moment (or is it the media that has these moments?).  I doubt either candidate will unravel though, they are both great politicians and have for the most part run very professional campaigns.

So it’ll be that scary S-word that decides.. that’s right Superdelegates.

Obama will be almost certainly be ahead, by somewhere between the 100 he’s ahead by today and let’s say 150 if things go well.  It’s possible that with a small lead (keep in mind there are over 4000 delegates in all) Hillary could find a way to make the case to the supedelegates that she’s the right candidate for the top of the ticket and Barack belongs in the VP slot.  (She’s already been making this suggestion.)

Whatever the outcome, superdelegates will surely be important, which is why I also wanted to take time to mention the Superdelegate Transparency Project. I work with some amazing people, one of whom is Conor Kenny who asked if I could help make a widget for Congresspedia’s Superdelegate Transparency Project. I wrote up some quick code and Sunlight’s creative director Kerry Mitchell made a nice template image.  We now have an embeddable widget for tracking superdelegates. You can take a look here in this post and I’m also adding it to the sidebar of the website. It’ll be a nice way to keep track of who is winning the superdelegate contest.

Filed under: Pres2008