According to NBC's First Read:
Obama picked up six delegates to Clinton’s one over the weekend.
And possibly two more, as they anticipate Obama will pick up one and Hillary will lose one in the final reckoning for Alaska's pledged delegates.
This leaves Obama 50 away from the magic number: he's likely to pull in at least 35 from PR, MT, and SD, so he only needs another 15 SDs to put him over the top. Should be a cakewalk.
This assumes MI and FL are not seated. Let's play the prediction game:
What do you think will happen with MI and FL?
Commonly floated options include: seat according to election results; seat according to election results but each del with only half a vote; seat all the supers but pledged dels cut by half (according to election results); split 50/50; or not seat them at all.
I think they will ultimately be seated, but the DNC will punish them for breaking the rules, and they will not be allowed to be determinative. The DNC has a strong interest in enforcing its control over the calendar, and if there is no punishment (let alone a reward) for breaking the rules, 2012 will be a rush to January. Similarly, Obama has an interest in reducing Hillary's delegate count, to prevent the race from getting too close. OTOH, he has a significant lead, so he can be somewhat magnanimous and allow some recognition of the electoral result without jeapordizing his lead.
So I'll go ahead and predict: full contingents seated, half a vote each.
3 comments:
I just can't imagine seating MI in any context without a re-vote.
FL and MI aren't the same. In FL they were all on the ballot. We're pretending, as we always do with the Clintons, that she didn't campaign there, even though she did. But everyone seems to give this lie a pass, so I'll go along with it. Everyone was on the ballot so there is at least a plausible argument that Florida has produced a reliable electoral result.
MI is entirely different. It's just stupid to say that MI has produced anything close to a reliable representation of their electorate.
I have no prediction.
I agree completely with regard to "fairness." Crazy Andy said it eloquently:
In every single State where both candidates campaigned ... the turnout was at least 75% of the Kerry vote. (CA: 75%; TX: 103%; PA: 79%; OH: 85%; NC: 107%; GA: 79%; as for IL and NY, IL: 70%; NY: 44%).
In contrast, in Michigan, the percentage was a paltry 24% and in Florida the percentage was 44%. That tells me that counting Michigan and Florida would disenfranchise a large number of voters who did not vote, because there was no campaigning and/or the voters there thought the contest would not count and so did not bother to vote.
The fundamental point is that a contest should be governed by the rules agreed to in advance. Period. If the primary campaign were about the popular vote, as the Clintons now want to argue, then the strategies of both campaigns would have been different, and Obama's radically different. To change the rules of the contest retroactively because one candidate lost is an outrageous attack on fairness, civility and sanity.
Having said that, we all knew from the beginning that FL and MI would be represented in some form at the convention, and it's just a matter of picking which face-saving, non-determinative form of seating would be the method. I really favor 50/50 splits, but with the Clintons refusing to go away, I doubt that will happen.
I predict that Hillary will be out of the race by the time the delegations are seated, and no-one will be there to make a stink about it.
Given that they will not make a difference, I'm thinking that it is a coin-toss whether they'll all be seated at full strength, or that neither will be seated at all.
I'm going with neither seated at all.
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