It's not by chance that the New York Times is nicknamed "The Gray Lady," giving the newspaper the reputation of being serious, well-mannered, and a bit boring. On 42° Street, it took a couple of weeks to recognize the obvious: the counting of Democratic delegates shows that Hillary Clinton has no real chance to snatch the nomination. "Trailing by more than 160 pledged delegates — those chosen in state primaries or caucuses — Mrs. Clinton has counted on Superdelegates to help her overtake Mr. Obama with a late surge before the party’s convention in August" wrote John Harwood yesterday. "The party’s rules for proportional allocation make it highly difficult for her to erase Mr. Obama’s pledged delegate lead, even if she sweeps the final 10 contests. (...) Yet Mrs. Clinton’s once formidable lead among Superdelegates who have announced preferences has shrunk to 34 by the Obama campaign count." Even if the pool of remaining uncommitted Superdelegates is around 330, many of them will support the candidate who prevailed in their home state, and that means an advantage to Obama, as we predicted on March 26, here.
The coldness of the "Supers" is understandable: they are politicians in good standing, and can read the numbers of the popular vote so far (advantage: Obama). They can read the polls, too, and Gallup tells us today that "Barack Obama now leads Hillary Clinton by a statistically significant margin, 52% to 43%." Same verdict at Rasmussen's, which gives Obama over the 50-percent-mark for the fifth consecutive day: "Obama now attracts 51% of the vote while Clinton earns 41%. Obama leads by five points among Democrats and by a two-to-one margin among unaffiliated voters." In other words, while Hillary has zero chances of capturing the nomination, how long her campaign will go on is another matter. According to well-respected Cook Political Report, "Generally speaking, presidential candidates don't decide to drop out because they lose primaries and caucuses; they decide when their donors have stopped writing checks and their campaigns run out of money. Unless Clinton wins Pennsylvania, Indiana, Kentucky, North Carolina and a few other places by landslide margins, which is very unlikely, her donors will stop giving and her campaign will grind to a halt."
