New York Times: California Looking Less Like a Sure Thing for Hillary Clinton

[pnwmom]

61. "ONLY"?! He would have to get big wins EVERYWHERE, wins of 70% or more of

the delegates in New Jersey AND California AND New Mexico.

In this whole election, he's only won a SINGLE primary with 70% or more, and that was Vermont. All his big wins were in mostly white caucus states. So he might do really well in the Dakotas, but he's going to fail everywhere else.


http://fivethirtyeight.com/features/hillary-clinton-clinches-democratic-nomination-according-to-ap/

In fact, Clinton can still win an elected delegate majority provided that she wins just 215 of the remaining 714 pledged delegates available on Tuesday and in the District of Columbia’s primary next week, or 30 percent. Because Democratic delegate allocations are highly proportional to the vote share in each state, that means she’d need only about 30 percent of the vote. Thus, even if Sanders won every remaining contest 70-30 — by 40 percentage points — he’d still only roughly tie Clinton in pledged delegates and even then would very probably still trail her in the popular vote.

There are not many plausible arrangements under which Sanders would have become the Democratic nominee. He’s been aided by caucuses, which have much lower voter participation. He’d trail even if all states had open primaries, which are generally favorable to Sanders. If the Democratic race were contested under Republican rules, with no superdelegates but winner-take-all delegate allocations in states such as Florida and Ohio, Clinton would have clinched the nomination long ago. Clinton has won in those states where the turnout demographics most closely resemble those of the Democratic Party as a whole.

So it’s not just that Sanders can only win if a huge number of superdelegates flip their vote to him.2 He can win only if a huge number of superdelegates who have committed to Clinton flip their vote against her, despite her having won a clear majority of votes and elected delegates, thereby overturning the popular will.