Today Is Clinton’s Chance To End The ‘Groundhog Day’ Campaign

[Algernon Moncrieff]

538/ Nate Silver

Clinton’s current lead — 235 pledged delegates — is still below her post-Ohio peak. But because there are relatively few states left to vote, she now needs only 41.6 percent of the remaining pledged delegates to clinch a pledged delegate majority, her lowest figure of the campaign to date. Sanders, conversely, will need 58.4 percent of the remaining pledged delegates to win a majority.

That’s already a tall order for Sanders, but if polls and demographic projections are roughly correct in the five states set to vote today, Sanders’s math will become even more challenging, requiring him to win about 65 percent of pledged delegates in the remaining states to surpass Clinton.

Clinton has clear leads in our polling-based forecasts of Pennsylvania and Maryland, which together have 284 pledged delegates (more than New York’s 247). She also narrowly leads Sanders in our forecast of Connecticut, while trailing him by a percentage point or two in Rhode Island. We’re not running a forecast in Delaware since there’s been only one poll there, but Clinton led Sanders in that survey.

Polls are sometimes inaccurate in primaries. Michigan has been the only state in the Democratic campaign so far where the substantial majority of polls misidentified the winner, but it was such a huge miss that it needs to be kept in mind. Still, in this case, the polls don’t diverge much from what you might expect from the states based on their demographics. Furthermore, all of the states voting today except Rhode Island are holding closed primaries, another factor helping Clinton.

[liberal N proud]

1. Great description of what it has been like