The Coming Brokered Democratic Convention
Published 3/3/2008 12:07:32 AM
There is only one thing the public can be certain of regarding the Democratic presidential nomination: without a miracle, there will be a brokered convention. Senator Barack Obama was leading Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton in the delegate count going into the Super Tuesday II primary elections on March 4. Obama held 1,193 primary delegates to Clinton’s 1,038. The status of the super delegates is meaningless because their pledges today may not carry any meaning come the Democratic nominating convention in Denver during the last week of August.
A Democratic candidate needs to reach a minimum of 2,025 delegates to clinch the nomination outright. Clinton will not reach that figure before the last primary election is held in Puerto Rico on June 7. Neither will Obama. The Illinois senator needs 832 more delegates to reach the magic number of 2,025. There are only 981 remaining primary delegates that are up for grabs. Three hundred seventy delegates will be decided on March 4 and 611 will be divvied up across 12 primaries between March 8 and June 7. Obama would have to win an astonishing 85% of the remaining 981 delegates in order to claim the Democratic nomination outright. There are no winner-take-all primaries for the Democrats. Obama will never get the needed 832 delegates. He may fall short of reaching 2,025 delegates by as many as 250.
This means that neither Obama nor Clinton will tally the needed 2,025 delegates when the primary election season is completed. The pair will have eleven weeks between Puerto Rico’s primary election on June 7 and the convening of the Democratic convention on August 25 to persuade super delegates to support their candidacy. A lot can happen in 11 weeks. There will be horse trading, influence peddling and cajoling. It will be a real knife fight to the end. […more..]