Bernie Sanders has won 56.1% of delegates outside of the South
We all knew the early primaries would tilt heavily in Hillary Clinton’s favor, due to her strength in the South (as well as her greater name recognition). The Sanders campaign strategy had always assumed as much — the hope being that Sanders will make up the ground in later, more favorable states (most notably, the West).
Thus far, Sanders’ performance in the South has been quite poor — he has won only 28.6% of delegates in the South.
The flip side of this is that Bernie Sanders has won a solid majority of non-Southern delegates — actually 56.1%. And of those 2950 delegates remaining to be elected, only 408 remain in the South (Florida, North Carolina, Mississippi, Louisiana).
What does it mean if these trends continue? A simple extrapolation gives:
Clinton: 1896 elected delegates
Sanders: 1817 elected delegates
This much closer than the decisive victory that the punditry is projecting. In fact, if Sanders can merely increase his performance outside of the South a little (i.e. from 56.1% to 57.8%), then he will win.
Winning 57.8% of the remaining non-Southern delegates might seem like a tall order — and it is. But it is not impossible — to me, the big news last night was how decisively Sanders won Minnesota. We will need many more of those big victories — thankfully, there are many more Western caucuses, which will start to dominate the calendar after March 15.
The biggest obstacle the Sanders campaign faces is demoralization of its own supporters. They will try to tell you that it is over — that Sanders is “in denial” or otherwise not “reality-based.” But the reality is that this is not nearly over. Winning will be incredibly difficult, yes — but who among Sanders supporters ever thought this would be easy?
How do we win? We get out and vote, and we will win.
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