justen

What a day. All I can say is, wow. Wow.

It’s well after midnight, and I need to get some sleep, but I wanted to jot down a few things before I head to bed.

Of all the states, with primaries or caucuses, if there was no such thing as superdelegates, and if every state was winner take all, with none of this “sometimes proportional, sometimes preferential” delegate “allocation” business… Hillary would have 2,004 delegates. Barack would have 1,607.

And what about the popular vote? With the majority of precincts reporting in Ohio and Texas, combined with all the earlier primaries (in Utah or otherwise), Hillary has a 31,000 vote lead, 12,742,317 to 12,711,266.

And, even still, there’s the fact that some states matter a lot more for Democrats in a general election. Looking at the states the Democrats needed to carry to win the White House the last time we did so, in 1996, Hillary has a primary vote lead of 508,723, with the percentage coming in at 51.5% to 48.5%. The delegate lead, though, changes dramatically when you focus on Democratic states holding popular vote primaries: Hillary has 1,600 to Barack with only 651.

This was a big day for Hillary Clinton. But the Democratic party has a lot of figuring out to do, especially given the situation with Michigan and Florida, the troubling status of superdelegates, and the growing gap between pledged delegates and the popular vote.