Monday Muse; It’s like I’m just repeating myself. It’s like I’m just repeating myself

June 2, 2008

Clinton Hinting at Dropping Out of Race…and Staying in Until the Convention

Hillary Clinton has booked Baruch College in New York for a post-primary rally on Tuesday after the final states, Montana and South Dakota, cast their votes. This is the first time since super Tuesday that she’s spent an election day in her home state, rather than a state that’s voting, so it’s likely that she’s planning an important announcement that will likely be one of these four things:
A) I am suspending my campaign
B) I am going to make this a convention floor fight
C) I’m running as an independent

If the things that her campaign’s surrogates are saying are any indication, it’s going to be choice B. Obama, on the other hand, is also scheduling his rally in an interesting place: the arena where the Republican national convention takes place. His motives are a lot less mysterious: To declare victory and officially declare the start of the general election. Look for him to heavily praise senator Clinton in this speech.

Obama is now about 40 delegates away from the nomination (42 to be precise). There are at least ten superdelegates who are known to be Obama supporters but haven’t endorsed yet. From the incredibly useful fivethirtyeight.com:

Jim Clyburn intends to announce on June 3.
Deb Kozikowski intends to announce by June 4.
Jimmy Carter will endorse after the primaries conclude.
Margie Campbell, who had one false start and had to retract on technical grounds, will become official after Montana ends.
Maria Cantwell has endorsed Clinton, but says she will endorse whoever gets 1705 pledged delegates.
Denise Johnson says she will endorse whoever gets 1705 pledged delegates.
Chris Van Hollen says he will endorse whoever gets 1705 pledged delegates.
Christine Pelosi says she will endorse whoever gets 1705 pledged delegates.
Nancy Pelosi says she will endorse whoever gets 1705 pledged delegates.
Donna Brazile says the RFK remark made her “numb,” that she will quit the Democratic Party if the superdelegates decide the party’s nomination, and there is only one way they can do that.

That leaves Obama 32 delegates away from the nod. Kucinich will likely announce for Obama within the next couple of days as well. There are a total of 33 delegates between Montana and South Dakota, and Obama can probably be expected to get somewhere from 13 to 20 of them (he leads by double digits in Montana, but in South Dakota there have been no reliable polls. Some accounts say he could win by 15 and others say he could lose by 30). Assuming he gets 16 pledged delegates in those primaries, he’ll then need 15 other superdelegates to announce by the end of voting to be technically able to declare victory. One marginally important number to watch is the popular vote, as that is a metric a lot of superdelegates will be using. If Clinton wins tomorrow by more than 24,586 votes (the amount she trails by in the most common tally, though it varies by hundreds of thousands of votes tally-by-tally) Obama will have a much harder time getting enough delegates to declare victory. If she doesn’t, I suspect Obama will get the endorsement of dozens of supers all at once, as he’ll be ahead in every measure.

And that’s the Muse.

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