Another Path to Victory for Bernie Sanders [View all]

[flamingdem]

http://www.counterpunch.org/2016/04/07/another-path-to-victory-for-bernie-sanders/

On March 2, I wrote up the projection that became Bernie’s Narrow Path to Victory in CounterPunch. Parts of it have held up incredibly well; other parts have been quite wrong. The overall outlook, however, is that five weeks and some 1371 contested pledged delegates later, Bernie Sanders is only about a dozen delegates short of where I said he would need to be as of April 6.

Not bad.

At the same time, aside from the contests of March 15, my race by race forecasts using a number of data points including FiveThirtyEight’s Facebook Primary (Adjusted to USPD), have been substantially accurate. Meanwhile, Nate Silver and FiveThirtyEight have set out a Rose Colored Glasses scenario for getting Sanders to the most pledged delegates as of June 15.

In what follows, I am not going to go over Bernie’s Narrow Path or the Rose Colored Path in any detail but will refer to them each occasionally. We’ve learned a bunch about what is possible and what isn’t in the previous five weeks. If you pressed me hard, I would probably say that Sanders is likely to fall around 50 delegates short on June 15, provided he even survives the race beyond April 26. But a potential 50 delegate shortfall in a more than 4,000 delegate race is no reason at all to throw in the towel. As such, I’m setting out a more realistic path to victory for Bernie Sanders than either my own month old effort or FiveThirtyEight’s.

LEARNING THE LESSON, MAKING THE PROJECTION

The major thing to learn, and that FiveThirtyEight definitively ignores, is the lesson of the Ides of March: hitting at or near your ceiling in five big states on one day as an insurgent is an impossible order. Four of the five races that will be held on April 26th, as opposed to just one on March 15, will be closed primaries. Accordingly, I am setting out a path to victory with much more pressure on the later race in California. Here is Another Path to Victory in text summary form; race by race notes bunched according to the calendar to follow: