US Politics Mega-thread - Page 2825

two obstacles in this theory's way: demographics and delegate arithmetic.

In poll after poll, Sanders's best group within the Democratic Party is liberal whites. Unfortunately for Sanders, Iowa and New Hampshire couldn't be much further on the extreme end of the party's demographic or ideological spectrum. According to our estimates, based on past exit polls and Census data, there is only one state where whites who self-identify as liberals make up a higher share of the Democratic primary electorate than Iowa and New Hampshire.

You guessed it: Vermont.

In fact, 98 percent of pledged Democratic delegates will come from states with lower shares of liberal whites than Iowa and New Hampshire. Just 447 of 4,051 pledged Democratic delegates - 11 percent - are tied to results in states or districts with higher shares of college-educated whites than New Hampshire. Moreover, just 13 percent of pledged Democratic delegates will be awarded in caucus states like Iowa, which as 2008 proved, tend to bring out more liberal participants than primaries.

In other words, if Sanders prevails narrowly in Iowa or New Hampshire, his support among liberal whites and in college towns - essentially Portlandia - would be entirely consistent with a scenario in which he also gets clobbered by Clinton nationally.

As Cook National Editor Amy Walter wrote last week, this race will come down to whether Sanders is Howard Dean or Barack Obama. While Dean fizzled in Iowa, Obama's Iowa win solidified his burgeoning popularity among white liberals but also legitimized his candidacy in the eyes of many previously skeptical African-American voters. But so far, there are few hints of a Sanders "expansion" constituency beyond liberal whites.

There's another gigantic Sanders math problem the Post failed to mention: thanks to Clinton's early dominance of superdelegates, he effectively begins the race eight points behind in the delegate count, before any votes are even cast.

Unlike on the GOP side, 713 of Democrats' 4,764 convention delegates (15 percent) are unpledged superdelegates. By the AP's count last November, Clinton had the support of 359 superdelegates. Since then, according to FiveThirtyEight's endorsement tracker, Clinton has picked up 21 congressional endorsements, for an estimated total of 380. The most recent count has Sanders at 11.

This is a much different story from a comparable point in the 2008 primaries, when Obama had already amassed a respectable number of superdelegates and most were still uncommitted. Unless uncommitted superdelegates switch allegiances or flock to Sanders in droves, he wouldn't just need to edge out Clinton in primaries, he would need to beat her soundly just to offset this huge deficit.
Source