The starting point is the delegate contest. At the end of the day the candidate with a majority of delegates at the convention will be nominee. No amount of hype or spin can diminish that reality. Up to now Hillary Clinton has won 1280 pledged delegates in the primaries and caucuses so far. Bernie Sanders has won 1030. There are 3964 pledged delegates to be won in all the contests. So a majority is 1983. There are 18 states and two territories still to vote, with 1661 delegates at stake. According to Democratic Party rules, they will be allotted proportionally, so that in each contest if a candidate wins 55% of the vote they will get 55% of the delegates at stake. That means Secretary Clinton still needs 703 of those 1661, or 42.3% of them. Starting with 1030, Senator Sanders needs 953 of the 1661 still out there, or 57.4%, to wind up with the majority. That means Bernie needs to win all the remaining states by an average of 15.1% to get ahead of Hillary in the pledged delegate count. That's a really tall order. His latest win, Wisconsin, was regarded as a decisive victory. Yet even there he came away with 55.8% of the 86 delegates up for grabs. That's below the percentage he needs from here on out.
And then there are the superdelegates to consider. The Democrats give convention votes to 712 nationwide party officials, such as congress members, governors, and mayors of large cities. 500 of these have committed to a candidate so far, and 469 of those have declared for Mrs. Clinton. Only 31 have come out for Bernie Sanders. So with the supers added in, that ups the convention delegate total to 4,763, with 2382 needed for a majority and the nomination. With her 469 superdelegates Hillary actually has 1749 delegate votes in hand. Adding his 31 supers, the Bern has 1061. That changes the calculation quite a bit. Clinton needs 633 more delegates to get from 1749 to 2382, and that's only 32.4% of the combination of pledged delegates and uncommitted superdelegates left. Sanders would have to get 1321 of them, or 67.6% of those still to be won. That's a real mountain, and probably outside the bounds of what is realistically achievable. In other words, by either the pledged delegates alone, or certainly with the superdelegates thrown in, Bernie's chances are a real longshot and highly improbable.
So the Sanders campaign has hit upon another strategy, and it could conceivably work. Their thinking is that if the Vermonter can continue to pull off a string of primary victories, especially in the big important states like New York, Pennsylvania and California, he can convince Clinton supers that she is fading and flip many who have said they are for Clinton over to his cause. So, what are the chances of that? Well, Sanders still has work to do. There is recent polling out in four important upcoming states. New York votes on April 19, with 247 delegates to win. (Election poll sourcing.) The last three polls there have Clinton ahead by 12, 10 and 18 points. Pennsylvania chooses 189 delegates on April 26, and the three most recent polls have Clinton ahead by 25, 22 and 6. Maryland awards 95 delegates on the same day, with Clinton up by 15 in the only recent poll taken there. California and its massive delegation of 475 delegates will be decided on June 7. The last four recent surveys there have Clinton ahead by 7, 11, 14 and 6.
The upshot is that the numbers heavily favor Hillary Clinton. Bernie Sanders, to win, has to come from behind in all these states by strong margins, strong enough to shake the majority of superdelegates so that they defect to his side. If I were handicapping odds I'd put Hillary Clinton's chances at better than 80% of being the Democratic nominee. Can Sanders win? It is not likely, but it is possible, but only if the Democratic electorate from here on out decides it wants to support him in a pretty overwhelming way.
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