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Super Tuesday 3!

St3

This election is kind of silly with Super Tuesdays, but in this case, it’s not overkill. We have the above assortment of 5 fine upstanding states, four of which happen to be among the most populous states in the union. So what happens here could indeed be pretty consequential for the race. Here’s what we have at stake on each side.

Democrats

You may recall that I made the case last week that Sanders is, mathematically speaking, a dead man walking. This was before his surprise win in Michigan, which I was certainly gratified by. So am I changing my tune? Well, I’m modifying the key slightly, but not really.

The thing about last week is that Sanders won a narrow victory in Michigan. A historically unprecedented, great news for his campaign victory, but still narrow. Clinton meanwhile won a lopsided victory in Mississippi, as she has throughout the South. It was so lopsided that, even though Mississippi is a significantly smaller state than Michigan, she ended up with more total votes and more delegates on Tuesday than Sanders, thus increasing the gap between them. Bluntly put, you can generate the best headlines ever, but if your opponent keeps scoring on you like this, you’re not going to win.

So wither my humming in a different key? This recent HuffPo piece makes a good case that Michigan presages that the next phase of the campaign is going to be tougher for Clinton and better for Sanders. We’ve all been noticing all along how lopsided her Southern victories have been. This got me mathematically curious, So I re-ran my totals from last week, honing in on the difference between Southern results and everywhere else. Overall, Clinton/Sanders are at 60/40 for vote totals so far, but if you break it down from there, it looks a bit different:

southern

The significant thing about this is, Clinton is almost out of Southern states. North Carolina and Florida are the only ones left. so one could make a not ridiculous argument that Sanders might win a majority of votes and delegates for the remainder of this race after Super Tuesday 3. Ultimately, though, that doesn’t change the math. Right now, excluding Superdelegates, we’re at:

math

If Sanders performs at the average of his non-Southern state totals for the remaining contests, he would still be under pace for the total of remaining delegates that he needs to win. Clinton would too, but not by as much, and the big wins she’s likely to get in Florida and North Carolina tomorrow will Probably bring it in range- she’ll need mid to high 40s percentage of remaining delegates, and she can be expected to average mid to high 40s percentage of remaining votes.

Sanders, meanwhile, based on where he’s done well so far, will probably win Missouri, and be quite competitive in Ohio and Illinois, maybe even score a narrow victory in one of them. I don’t think this changes the ultimate trajectory, but he now has every chance of remaining in the race, and strongly so, for the duration.

Republicans

The big story here is the winner-take-all contests in Florida and Ohio. Unlike the Democrats, who generally reward delegates proportional to vote most everywhere, the Republicans have many states where the highest placing candidate gets all the delegates. In this case, interestingly, it intersects with the home states of two of the remaining candidates, Marco Rubio and John Kasich. Unfortunately for Rubio, all signs are that this won’t work out for him:

florida

Kasich, meanwhile, seems to have a pretty decent shot of taking his home state, and all of its delegates:

Ohio

All of this is quite volatile. You can make a good case that, notwithstanding what happens in Florida and Ohio, Trump could do well enough in the other states to effectively put the whole thing away. On the other hand, you could also make the case that Cruz is close enough that, if Super Tuesday 3 ends up knocking out both Kasich and Rubio, he could still win a one-on-one with Trump. We could also have a case where, by virtue of winning Ohio while Rubio loses Florida and places badly elsewhere, Kasich becomes the surviving establishment candidate, holding down a roughly equal percentage of votes to Cruz going forward, and keeping all three of them below the threshold before the convention.

This is where the numbers stand at the moment:

math2

Where they are at this point next week will be fascinating to see!

State of the Race: Post Super Tuesday And Swell Saturday

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state

stae2

In last week’s column, I posited that it was super-possible that both nominations would effectively be decided on Super Tuesday. Now that the Tuesday in question has come and gone and we’ve also had a pretty swell Saturday’s (and pinch of Sunday) worth of contests, how am I doing? In all honesty, I’d have to give myself a 42.5%. As follows…

Democrats

I think it’s important to fully out myself before I say what I’m about to say. No surprise to anybody who knows me, I lean toward the Progressive side of the fence. I would vastly prefer to see Sanders be the nominee instead of Clinton, and I think he’s the only major candidate in the race who is even close to talking about the magnitude of changes we’ll need to make to avoid disaster at home and as a global species in the coming decades. I voted for him in our primary in Vermont, contribute to his campaign every pay day, and will continue to do so as long as he’s in the race. Despite all this, I am, reluctantly, 85% confident that the Democratic Race has in fact been decided for Clinton, though it will take the numbers a while to catch up.

It comes down to some simple facts of math. Counting just the pledged delegates because, as many people have pointed out, Superdelegates can (and do) change their votes as the race shifts, we currently have:

delegate

Given what each candidate has, how many delegates are remaining, and how many are needed for the nomination, this is the percentage of remaining delegates each would have to win to get the nomination:

maths

The issue with pledged delegates on the Democratic side is that they are more or less proportional- if you win, say 60% of the votes, you would expect to also win roughly 60% of the delegates. Some of the caucus states don’t report their numbers in a way that votes can be tabulated, but of the seventeen states and territories that have voted so far that we can add up votes for, this is the percentage breakdown:

bdown

Refer back to the delegate target numbers above. Clinton has won 61% of the vote so far, and she would need roughly 54.5% of the remaining delegates. She could actually do about 10% worse than she’s done so far in all the remaining contests and still do it. Sanders has won 39% of the vote so far, but he’d need to win 60% of the remaining delegates. He would have to do about 50% better than he’s done so far in all the remaining contests to take it.

Is this categorically impossible? No. Bernie clearly has the financial and enthusiastic supporter resources to stay competitive, and is still less well known than Clinton, so he has room to grow. And Clinton has often proven to be a less appealing campaigner when she’s ahead than when she’s behind, and also has investigations brewing which (based on bullshit or not) could blow up at any time. Barring something truly disruptive, though, you would be surprised to see Clinton do markedly worse in the 2/3 remaining than the 1/3 behind. And you’d be really surprised to see Sanders do 50% better.

Republicans

As for my prediction about Trump before Super Tuesday, I would have to mark myself as totally wrong! It looked quite possible, going in, that Cruz wouldn’t win anything except his home state of Texas, and Rubio wouldn’t win anything. But, while Trump did quite well, Rubio won Minnesota and hung in there in other races (albeit much less well than he would have if Kasich weren’t still hanging around). Cruz, meanwhile, won several states, and racked up some more this weekend.

You can’t as readily do the kind of delegate vs. votes analysis I did above for the Democrats with the Republicans, as they have several large winner-take all states, and also have many states where there’s a threshold of 20% to get any delegates at all. However, their delegate math at the moment is:

totals

And their vote totals have been:

totals2

In other words, even allowing for the distorting effects of Republican delegate allocation rules, nobody so far has had nearly a total vote percentage even roughly comparable to the delegate percentage total they’d need. This outlook could change if it got down to a two-person race. However, that’s not remotely likely to happen until after March 15th, since Rubio and Kasich both aim to win their respective winner-take-all home states that day (Florida and Ohio).

Another 12 states and territories will have had contests by then, including five of the ten most populous states in the country (Florida, Illinois, Michigan, North Carolina & Ohio). So, come 3/16, more than half of all delegates will have been handed out, and odds are three candidates will have major blocks, all of them needing much more to go to get to the total. If anything, at this point, I might start to put my money on a brokered convention.

It’s Super-possible both nominees will be chosen Tuesday

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Yes, that image is from 2008. But it so Super-well combines two of my loves, Presidential Politics and Comics, that I had to do it. You may have heard that this Tuesday is Super. Some election cycles it’s more super, some less so, but this year on both sides the calendar is so front-loaded that half of all the delegates will be chosen by the end of March. So this kickoff with more than a fifth of the states in the Union voting on the same day is pretty significant. In fact, I think a good case can be made that both nominations will effectively be decided tomorrow…

Democrats

Sanders had been hewing pretty close to what I pegged in my first election blog of the year as his “best case”: “he wins Iowa, then New Hampshire, and does better than-expected in Nevada and South Carolina, and goes on to get a striking distance 40% or more of the states and delegates on Super Tuesday”. Until Sunday, when he lost South Carolina by almost 50%.

The campaign made a deliberate decision over the past week to basically concede the state, and concentrate resources on making as big a splash later in March as possible. It’s an understandable strategy in a case where you know you’re going to lose a state anyway and so does everyone else. But there’s “lose” and then there’s “get obliterated”. 538.com has an analysis suggesting that, if he performs as poorly with Black voters on Super Tuesday as he did he in South Carolina, even if he wins several other states, Clinton may do so well in the Southern states with larger delegate totals that she’ll open a delegate lead he just can’t catch even if he has upside surprises later in the month.

Another way to look at is to work backwards from the national numbers. Currently the averages show the following:

Capture

These numbers are kind of so all over the place that you can wonder what’s up, but it does look like the momentum is tipping back to Hillary. If you take the old data analysis trick of removing the highest and lowest (Clinton ahead by 17 and Sanders ahead by 3) and averaging the rest, you’d still come to the conclusion that Clinton is ahead by about 6% nationally. Over at 538.com, Nate Silver has a pretty sophisticated analysis indicating where Clinton and Sanders would be state by state if tied nationally. Let’s zoom in on the “Super Tuesday” portion of that:

gap

If, instead of being tied, you assume Clinton is ahead by 6 points nationally, you’d expect Sanders to win Vermont, Minnesota, Colorado, and Massachusetts, and Clinton to take everything else. Since everything else in this case includes some very populous states, her delegate haul from that would put him far enough behind that he would not only have to perform, but outperform the rest of the contests to catch up. This is pretty much what Obama did to Clinton in 2008, and she was unable to rally back even though she stayed competitive the whole time, with several big wins along the way. And if Sanders doesn’t even manage to capture all four of those states…

Clearly he has the money and the core supporter enthusiasm to stick it out throughout March and well into April. And even if he does slip as I’m outlining here, I’d expect some surprises in March and April that will lead to “Sanders is back!” headlines. But the mathematical path forward is hard to see unless he really outperforms tomorrow.

Republicans

If I think it’s starting to smell like Clinton pulls into an uncatchable lead tomorrow, this is doubly so for Trump. The Republicans have even more states on the docket than the Democrats do:

docket

Some of these states haven’t had any recent good polling. But if you look at the RCP run-down of the ones that have, you’ll immediately see that Cruz has a lead in Arkansas and his home state of Texas, but everything else is coming up Trump. If Cruz isn’t performing better than that in the Southern states that should be his strongest, it’s hard to find a plausible scenario where he overtakes Trump later. Rubio has a somewhat more conceivable path, namely that if he can get himself into a one-on-one with Trump, he can start winning some of the large and more moderate “winner take all” states that are coming up later in the calendar.

Except, Cruz has every incentive to see how many delegates he can build up through the end of March, and Kasich is showing every sign of refusing to clear the stage for Rubio at least until his home state of Ohio votes on March 15th. By then, Trump will have cleared enough of the board that he will be very hard to catch. We may know as soon as tomorrow if Rubio and Cruz are effectively unable to catch up. They could still stay in and keep anyone from getting enough delegates to take it before the convention , leading to a floor fight there. But the major donors are already showing reluctance to spend against Trump, and he’s getting his first establishment endorsements. The party may decline to join their fight, and instead get on board with Trump.

Tune in tomorrow, and we shall see!