A Reality Check on the Democratic Primary

It's Tuesday. Specifically, it's Tuesday, March 15th, the Ides of March, and a key turning point in both presidential primaries. But who cares about the Republicans; this post is about the Democrats. One week ago, on Tuesday, March 8th (a.k.a. International Women's Day), the soon-to-be first female President suffered a really shocking defeat in Michigan, where polls had her up by over 20 points. Bernie ended up winning, just barely, by about 1.5%. It was shocking, and made us reconsider everything we thought we knew about how the race is going. Today (well, tomorrow, really, since it's only just barely Tuesday as I'm writing this), five big states will vote, the first and last time that will happen. It's Missouri, North Carolina, Ohio, Illinois, and Florida. And we'll see whether Michigan was a harbinger of things to come, in terms of polling error, or whether things will be basically back to normal. If the latter, we're looking at big Clinton wins in Florida and North Carolina, the last Southern states to vote, a more modest Clinton win in Ohio, a close race in Missouri, and... god knows what's going on in Illinois.

But it's worth taking stock of how things are going, because... they're going really well for Hillary. You can see how well using the FiveThirtyEight delegate targets. In almost every state, Hillary's meeting or beating her targets. And while Bernie does have a few states where he's beat his targets, they're tiny little victories. He netted one delegate versus his target in Oklahoma and Maine, two apiece in Vermont (by shutting Hillary out) and Colorado, and by five in Kansas. That's his biggest win. In Michigan, his great victory only amounted to holding Hillary to her targets. Meanwhile, Hillary has seven wins bigger than Bernie's biggest, in South Carolina (+7), Georgia (+9), Alabama (+9), Mississippi (+9), Virginia (+10), Tennessee (+11), and Texas (+22). Indeed, Tennessee all by itself is enough to cancel out all five of Bernie's wins. Put it all together and she's 88 delegates ahead of her targets, which means he's 88 delegates behind his targets. He doesn't just need to win going forward. He needs to win big. He needs to win big states by big margins. He needs to beat his targets by big margins in big states. And those targets include winning New York. Hillary's from New York.

And all this, having not delivered a single win of the sort he needs.

Here's another fact about tomorrow: it marks the half-way point of the campaign. 2006 delegates will have been awarded after tomorrow, with only 1946 to come (plus a handful here or there from non-state primaries). So after tomorrow, Bernie will need to win by the same margin he's lost by to date. Let's assume he manages to hold Hillary even in delegates. And let's also say he manages to hold her even in delegates between California and New York. All of that is generous to Bernie, I think. The 538 targets would have Hillary winning 723 of the 1413 delegates at stake in those seven states, and that has Bernie narrowly winning New York. So that would leave Bernie 223 delegates behind (as he is right now), with 1224 delegates left to be awarded. He'd need to win 724 of those delegates, or nearly 60%. Take Pennsylvania and New Jersey out of the mix, the two biggest states, where a combined delegate split also looks pretty generous for Bernie, and you're talking about only 909 delegates left. He'd need to win 557 of those. Here are the states where Bernie's won more than 60% of the delegates: Kansas and Vermont. That's his home state, and one other state. (EDIT: whoops, I forgot Maine. There's also Maine.)

If he can't win big tomorrow, bigger than it looks like he should, and if he can't win big in the four biggest states that will remain after tomorrow, his task is to win everywhere else as thoroughly as he won Kansas. (And Maine!)

That really doesn't seem very plausible. And that means that, 24 hours from now, it might start looking pretty much impossible for him to win. Unless we get another Michigan.