We should see a split decision on Tuesday, with Barack Obama taking Oregon and Hillary Clinton Kentucky. Hillary is Queen of the Ohio Valley and Barack is King of the West. The impact will be similar to what we saw two weeks ago, when Clinton won Indiana and Obama took North Carolina. The upshot is, Clinton will not make up sufficient ground to appreciably slow Obama's march to the nomination.
Kentucky portends another Ohio Valley blowout for Hillary. She should win by a 2-1 margin and emerge with roughly 34 of the Bluegrass State's 51 delegates. The demographics there play to her strengths, blue-collar whites who are older than average.
Oregon ought to be a solid Obama state. He should win by about 13 points. That will get him about 29 of the 52 delegates at stake. Oregon is a fairly liberal state, and the highly-educated hub of Portland is full of the kind of professionals who like Obama.
If these projections hold, Clinton will come out of Tuesday's voting with 56 delegates to Obama's 46. That will close her overall deficit to 180 overall delegates, give or take a handful. It's too little too late for the New York Senator.
Superdelegates continue to flow to Obama; he picked up 10 more over the weekend to Clinton's 4. With Puerto Rico (55 delegates) the last contest of any size, there simply aren't enough delegates left for her to win. Even if Michigan and Florida were to be included on her terms it still wouldn't be enough.
Many ask why Hillary goes on. From her perspective, one might ask, why not? There are only two weeks left until the process ends on June 3. Having come this far she has nothing to lose by running to the tape. She will have burnished her credentials as a dogged, never-say-die fighter. She could well be thinking that might come in handy somewhere down the road.
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