Congratulations to Bernie for his WV victory tonight, his most impressive thus far this month (likely to be surpassed in Oregon, tonight’s outlier poll notwithstanding).
To put it in context, though, I would like to refer to the latest targets calculated by subir — my colleague in Adalah, a hard-core Bernie supporter, and an overall kick-ass diarist (myself, I’m a soft-core Bernie supporter and overall lazy-ass diarist).
Hard-core and all, as Hillary has cemented her delegate lead, subir has taken the lead in injecting a healthy dose of reality into “Bernie can with this” discussions, first and foremost by re-calculating the targets Bernie needs to win from a given point onwards in order to reach 50% of pledged delegates. As far as I remember, he’s done that with no models and assumptions, just taking the original square-one 538 targets, and reapportioning the shortfall.
subir’s latest update was before the May contests. Here are his goals for the 3 that have gone by thus far:
| 83 | Open Primary | 48 | 53 | 44 | -9 |
| 7 | Modified Caucus | 4 | 4 | 3 | -1 |
| 29 | Modified Primary | 19 | 21 | 16-18 | -3 to -5 |
Despite winning the two larger contests, Bernie is accumulating more deficits which must be made up elsewhere. And despite these 3 contests being smaller than some remaining ones, the added shortfall is not insignificant.
Here’s how the targets look now for the 5 largest remaining contests which account for nearly 800 of the ~900 remaining delegates, including next week’s pair, using subir’s methodology (ok, lazy-assing it somewhat):
| 55 | Closed Primary | 33 | 36 | 37 | 18 |
| 61 | Closed Primary | 45 | 49 | 50 | 11 |
| 60 | Open Caucus | 33 | 36 | 37 | 23 |
| 475 | Modified Primary | 274 | 301 | 308 | 167 |
| 126 | Modified Primary | 67 | 74 | 76 | 50 |
The only target that might be realistic is Kentucky. Longshot for a closed primary, but maybe doable.
As I said above, Bernie is likely to win big in Oregon, but not to the point of driving Hillary to the verge of non-viability in the state, as the target requires.
No one in a contested race, except a governor/Senator from California, can expect to win that huge and incredibly diverse state by 30 points.
And the concept of Bernie winning either NJ or Puerto Rico by 20 points is outlandish, but both? Beyond the pale.
NOTE: Bernie must hit (in aggregate) ALL 5 targets, not, e.g., only Kentucky. Beyond these 5 there are only scraplets of delegates, and each scraplet comes with its own formidable “subir target”. This makes the overall task literally extra-Terrestrial...
...But not quite as extra-Terrestrial, as the idea that the Superdelegates can be somehow convinced to offset Hillary’s Voterdelegates majority.
At this point — and this has been true for a while now — the only path to a Bernie victory is some complete and tragic Hillary collapse. Only mean-spirited fools would wish for such a scenario, which would arguably cause far more damage to the party (at least in the 2016 elections), than all the purported “Bernie or Bust” losses.
So, it is what it is. The remaining primary voters are valid, their voices are worthy, their votes will be counted, their delegates will be seated — but in sports terms we are very deep into Garbage Time.