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Clinton Can’t Catch Up In Delegates OR Popular Vote

By Justin Gardner | Related entries in 2008 Election, Barack, Democrats, Hillary, Super Delegates!!!

Here’s some more fuel for the “Hillary can’t win” fire from Bloomberg:

April 21 (Bloomberg) — To overtake Barack Obama in the nationwide popular vote, Hillary Clinton needs a bigger win in tomorrow’s Pennsylvania primary than she has had in any major contest so far. And that’s just for starters.

After more than 40 Democratic primaries and caucuses, Obama, the Illinois senator, leads Clinton by more than 800,000 votes. Even if the New York senator wins by more than 20 percentage points tomorrow — a landslide few experts expect — she would still have a hard time catching him.

Clinton needs “blowout numbers,” says Peter Fenn, a Democratic consultant who isn’t affiliated with either campaign. “The wheels would have to come off the Obama bus, and the engine would have to blow.”

Even if she wins in a blowout of more than 20% she’d have a hard time catching him. And here’s more cold, hard math…

To earn that split decision, though, Clinton would need a 25-point victory in Pennsylvania, plus 20-point wins in later contests in West Virginia, Kentucky and Puerto Rico. Even that scenario assumes Clinton, 60, would break even in Indiana, North Carolina, South Dakota, Montana and Oregon — a prospect that’s not at all certain.

Now, she might be able to wrestle ties out of Indiana, South Dakota and Montana, but not Oregon and North Carolina. Again, the math doesn’t add up.

So, she simply can’t catch up, but the fact remains that Barack won’t be able to win without superdelegates, so unless a ton break his way after a win in North Carolina, this thing is set to go all the way to the convention.

More as it develops…

This entry was posted on Monday, April 21st, 2008 and is filed under 2008 Election, Barack, Democrats, Hillary, Super Delegates!!!. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

One Response to “Clinton Can’t Catch Up In Delegates OR Popular Vote”

Nelson Says:
April 21st, 2008 at 6:12 pm
FIVE posts in the same day about the Democratic horse race. Ok, we know there are polls. We know there’s math. We know there’s a primary in PA. But for goodness sakes, we don’t need 5 front page posts IN THE SAME DAY talking about who is/will be ahead in the nomination process.

Talk about issues, talk about who said what, but leave the horse race stuff to no-more-than once per day.

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